Cara a Cara

I always filmed as a way of remembering, of preserving something that might one day be given meaning. It was—and still is—fun to film, to know that I am keeping something, preserving emotions, and that I have the power to feel them again. That is how I built an archive of experiences, encounters, and recordings of family members, and above all of one person who has marked me in many different ways throughout my life: my father. I filmed him whenever I could, trying to understand him, to unravel what lay behind him. I identified with him, hated him, and loved him, as much as I did myself. And he identified with me; he saw a physical and emotional resemblance between us. He always made that clear to me. That is why he let me film him and never even asked me, “What for?”.

I think he felt that he could be a character worthy of being filmed. And even when he was unaware that a camera was there—I filmed him secretly quite often—there was always, underneath it all, a kind of behavior that belonged to a character: unusual, daring, irreverent, inappropriate, wild, charming, well-timed, and a great manipulator. My father was not only the great character in my personal archive; he was also a major source of inspiration for my fictional films. And whenever he saw himself represented in my films, he enjoyed it more than anyone else. Ultimately, he had been my first character.

[…] A few years ago, a bell went off in my head telling me that I needed to venture into the jungle of my archive, perhaps under the pretext of understanding more about my adult life, my life as a father, and my life as a filmmaker.

— Federico Veiroj