Gabriel Medina Overcomes Challenges Of Moviemaking In Argentina To Come To TIFF
Posted September 14, 2008 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Sitting in one of the rooms at the Sutton Place Hotel in downtown Toronto, Gabriel Medina admits he’s nervous.
It’s the filmmaker’s third time out of his home country, Argentina, and his first trip to Canada. He’s in town promoting his feature film debut, Los Paranoicos (The Paranoids), which was invited to screen at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival as part of the Discovery programme.
“The screenplay is a lot of little stories of me and my friends,” he tells CityNews.ca. “I tried to make a mirror with the film, I started looking at myself and my friends and the world we (were) living (in).”
The film is set in Buenos Aires, where Medina was born. He studied film at the Universidad del Cine and directed a number of short films and the television documentary series Urban Mysteries before making Los Paranoicos, which he describes as very personal.
At its center is Luciano Gauna (Daniel Hendler), a 30-year-old aspiring screenwriter earning a living by dressing up as a popular children’s character and entertaining at birthday parties. It’s not exactly where he’d like to be in life, and his feelings of self-doubt are made worse when he learns that his successful friend Manuel (Walter Jakob) has written a TV series called The Paranoids in which one of the characters is unflatteringly modeled after him. Then Manuel’s girlfriend Sofia (Jazmin Stuart) enters the picture and Luciano finds himself drawn to her.
Medina admits the character of Gauna is drawn partly from him. He made the movie with help from friends and doesn’t know if he could work any other way.
“It’s like a family and that was great because it was like an adventure to make this movie. It was teamwork,” he explains.
The Argentinian director grew up watching films by noted directors John Ford, William Wyler, Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, and says he knew from childhood that he wanted to follow in their footsteps despite the financial hardships involved in making films in his country.
“Getting the money is very difficult. It’s not a business in Argentina to make films. There’s not a lot of producers,” he says, adding that it’s very expensive to even go to the cinema there.
“The economical situation now is not very good. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I see that there are a lot of new filmmakers, (so) I’m an optimist.”
Given those challenges, Medina says he has to pinch himself to believe that his film is playing at the Toronto event.
“I’m very happy. I can’t believe this. This is my third time out of my country, and my first film that is very important for me,” he says. “This is a very prestigious festival, and very important. There are many great directors here that have a lot of history. To show my film here, I can’t believe it.”
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