Oaxacan Lalo Santos is absent from the presentation of “Pornomelancolía”, a film that competes in San Sebastián

The film portrays depressive periods and sex work in his life and “there were no mental health specialists” who attended him during the filming, criticizes the protagonist. Argentine director Manuel Abramovich says he is “puzzled” by the actor’s decision

San Sebastian, Spain, September 21, 2022. The San Sebastian International Film Festival presented the film in the official section pornmelancholyan almost documentary portrait of an occasional sex worker, which led to a disagreement between the protagonist, the Oaxacan actor Lalo Santos, and the Argentine director, Manuel Abramovich, due to “the conditions” of the shoot.

The actor Lalo Santos had announced in August that he would not go to the screening and presentation of the film in San Sebastián because he did not agree with the conditions in which the film was made. “There were serious flaws in the planning, in addition to a lack of capacity and sensitivity on the part of the director and the production,” criticized the actor on social networks.

In addition, he assured that the film “recreates the events of a depressed person who does porn, that is, an important period” of his life. “There were never any mental health specialists as part of the team and that was a huge mistake.” Finally, Santos did not attend the presentation of the film, which is in the official competition.

“It is very sad that Lalo cannot be here answering the questions with me and expressing anything he wants to express about the things he feels. But in addition to being sad, I am disconcerted,” said the director of the film, Manuel Abramovich, who recalled that “it is not a film about porn and there are hardly any images of explicit sex.”

Abramovich explained that this work was a four-year process, “very long, collaborative. I would have loved for Lalo to be here, but well, I feel like making films with people is a risk and a learning experience. I don’t understand it, but knowing that Lalo may be feeling differently in relation to the film, I keep asking myself questions,” lamented the filmmaker.

The Buenos Aires director assured that he was “totally open to understanding” what the actor “may be feeling now. I would love to talk to him and be able to listen to the things he is feeling and rethink what he could have done better during the process,” said the director, who, however, insisted that it was “a collaborative process.”

In fact, pornmelancholy arises from the fact that Abramovich met Lalo Santos through social networks. “I felt a lot of admiration and fascination because Lalo directed his own life for a virtual audience and had created this character: Lalo Santos, a Mexican macho,” he said at a press conference.

Thus, the film did not have a closed script and that is how the scenes were recorded. “Many elements are inspired by things in his life and others are staging. For a moment the filming seemed more like a documentary, and for others a fiction”, recalled Abramovich, who also gave as an example the filming of a pornographic film on the tape itself, and which will have its own premiere, with the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata as the protagonist. .

“It was very interesting, because on set the two films were like sisters. At times I borrowed the setting from the shooting, but I was not interested in sex: my film takes porn as a setting to talk about intimacy, about people who feel vulnerable and alone, ”she concluded.

“It’s not so special” to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, says the writer Kazuo Ishiguro, who received the award in 2017

The writer Kazuo Ishiguro, who is presenting the film Living at the San Sebastian Film Festival, in which he participated as a screenwriter, assured that “once you win the Nobel Prize (for Literature), you realize that you are not so special.

“It’s wonderful to win prizes like the Nobel, but when you win them, you realize they’re not that special. Yes, it’s great, receiving them, I feel honored, but at the same time you realize that they don’t really touch on the fundamental issues of existence: is life worth living? Does what you do make sense or is it worth doing? ?”, declared in an interview with Europa Press the British author of Japanese origin, awarded in 2017.

In this sense, Ishiguro recalled that Living roomis a remake of ikiru, by Akira Kurosawa, which shows “that lonely feeling of success that one can feel when you win the Nobel. In the end, what you have to ask yourself is what do you do, if your life has been complete and that answer is not given by the prizes”, he raised.

With Living room, Ishiguro completes a personal project that took him several years to start. His intention was always to adapt that work by Kurosawa with a setting of a British film from the 30s and 40s, “an excellent period of cinema”, and with the actor Bill Nighy. What was not planned was his participation in the script.

“The producer asked me if I wanted to try it, and I told him that I didn’t feel like a scriptwriter and that I was also trying to finish my novel. But it was something that I had wanted to do for so many years and it meant so much to me that I said ‘I’m going to try it’, although with conditions: if the script turned out bad, another writer would be found”, he stressed.

Ishiguro explained that Kurosawa’s film was “very important” in his teens because “it had a different message than Hollywood movies. The important thing was that he was saying that even with a mediocre or insignificant life, you can contribute to humanity and live life to the fullest of your possibilities”, he highlighted.

The Nobel Prize winner affirms that this idea coincides with the fact that “probably in life no one is going to recognize your merits or praise you, people are not going to realize what you do, but in spite of everything it is It is important to do so because your triumph may be living a discreet life in the best possible way.

“When I saw the film at that time I couldn’t think that I would be a writer or win a Nobel Prize or anything like that, I thought I was going to have a discreet life and that is why this attitude seemed very important to me. I have lived with this film all my life and it has been a part of me, ”he claimed.

The author regrets, however, the vertiginousness of today’s world, “with its capitalism, social networks and the Internet. People are just working long hours and they don’t know how their contribution is going to be used by the company they work for, they don’t know what is going to happen to their contribution to the world and it’s very easy to get lost and isolated in the process, like the officials in the movie,” he reiterated.

For Ishiguro, the film is “a metaphor for life today. It seems that there is a communication, you can go upstairs to say that there is a message, but it is lost along the way and the process, ”she concluded.

The screenwriter of Easy replies to Cristina Morales that “the only thing she can say is what she has received”

The screenwriter and director Anna R. Costa replied to the writer Cristina Morales that “the only thing she can say” about the series Easy, created by Costa for Movistar+ and based on the book easy readingby Morales, is “what he has received”.

Costa responded in this way at the presentation of the series within the framework of the 70th edition of the San Sebastian Festival, together with the leading actresses of the series, Anna Castillo, Natalia de Molina, Coria Castillo and Anna Marchessi, in line with the controversy over Morales’ rejection of this adaptation.

The writer who won the National Narrative Award showed in a column, titled Nazi and written under the pseudonym Crispina Modales, in Rolling Stone magazine, her rejection of the “whitening” of the characters of the social workers -represented in the series by the actress Bruna Cusí–, and the institution they represent.

After reading the text, Costa answered Cristina Morales herself about the content of the column. After pointing out that the author has “the freedom to express what she thinks”, she assured that she told her that if she wanted to talk about the series they could talk about the series and insisted that “the only thing” that the writer could say about Easy ” It was what he had charged” for the adaptation.

Text: Europe Press