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Young Filmmakers Expound Briefly on Their "Shorts"

Doris Morales translated by Morris Thompson

The films and their directors were El cerebro (The Brain) and Autorretrato (Self-Portrait) by Alejandro Argüelles, Tugging Hearts and La ligera presión de un pensamiento (The Light Pressure of a Thought) by Paula Assadourian, Mi niña (My Little Girl) by Horacio Ramírez, Recto recto gancho (Jab Jab Uppercut) by Santiago Maza and El venado y la niebla (The Deer and the Fog) by Miguel Ángel Ventura.

Assadourian said that making an animated film seems to her to be a way of presenting things that ordinarily can't be seen, which she said was the case with her two shorts that deal with various levels of communications between people.

Ramírez said he picked the subject of Mi niña because he isn't comfortable with notions of what it is to be a man or a woman. "I've never been in agreement with these roles so strict that they imprint you from the time you're small," he said.  "So I wanted to pose the question of what would result if someone with male genitals were reared in the strictest and most traditional way."

Mariana Rodríguez, the producer of Recto recto gancho, noted that six people were involved in its pre-production, from the decision on the idea to the challenge of filling the arena where the boxing movie was made. "We had the support of great actors like Gustavo Sánchez Parra, which made things easier, because they worked without pay." She added that the work won the prize for Best Production at the International Festival of  Student Film Shorts in Madrid.

Ventura said his film, with the support of the Universidad de San Agustín in Mérida, was an effort to recount some of the legends of his native Yucatan "because there's so much to tell," he said. The short was three years in the making, he added.

Argüelles said his two films were made as assignments in a directing class at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos (CUEC, of Mexico's National University).  In the first of those, El cerebro, he said that "we had to make a one-minute film on an object.

"You had one week to do the shooting script, film it, edit it and turn it in," he said. "I was in a crisis about what to do, and I thought sometimes you can be your own worst enemy and it makes you want to grab your brain and throw it away. And that's how I got the idea."

The second film, Argüelles said, had to be a self-portrait, "and so I hunted up a collection of drawings I did as a kid, because I think drawings are more revealing of one's self."

Saint-Martín closed the session with the story of how he came to make Nubes distantes:
"I made my short in a seminar-workshop at a festival in Ecuador, in which we were asked to create a scene from a film that we had as a guide," he said. "I adapted it, and that became my short."