February in La Paz is wild. The weather is wild, the sun shines and burns, the sky breaks into heavy storms, there are landslides, and then there's Carnival, a time when the streets become battle fields where women become the main targets of water baloons, water guns, water space weapons, foam and other forms of total annoyance of the good citizens of this country. It's also a time when people act silly, get really drunk and sing stupid and misogynistic songs, even the president of this ex republic that sang: "the president has a good heart, he takes off his (female) minister's panties off" or "the bartolinas (indigenous women organization) are famous because I take them straight to bed".
And it is in February when three of our films take off in their own particular and crazy way.
Sirwiñakuy, Amy's first film, went to New York and had a great reception at the CineKink festival. The following quote tells the story, it's in Filmmaker's Magazine:
And our international premiere of Amy Hesketh’s Sirwiñakuy, also felt like a discovery, one which split our audience as much as it purportedly did in its originating Bolivia. One of our crew dismissed it as “a Bolivian 9 1/2 Weeks,” while another wrote on my Facebook page, “The director of Sirwiñakuy, Amy Hesketh is pretty much a visual genius and I hope someone ‘important’ sees her beautiful, soulful work. GREAT!” (I tend to fall in with the latter, though am also a fairly big fan of 9 1/2 Weeks, so would count that as a compliment also.) Amy had a shinning moment, a well deserved shinning moment. Sirwiñakuy is a very original film, the story is told in a simple and effective way. It invites the audience to enter into the intimacy of a couple's life to the point that it makes them uncomfortable.
Some people love that, some people hate it. A lot of the critics in Bolivia hated it.
Pedro Susz, a well known critic had this to say:
Incidentally, Pedro Susz is the founder of the Cinemateca and, ironically, Sirwiñakuy had a long and successful run in its screens, it was there for over 5 months. It was the third highest grossing film, topping Shreck in 2010 in that movie house.
Bill Carpenter has the opinion that:
“The director of Sirwiñakuy, Amy Hesketh is pretty much a visual genius and I hope someone ‘important’ sees her beautiful, soulful work. GREAT!”
It pretty much shows the difference of opinions concerning Sirwiñakuy.
While Sirwiñakuy was in New York, Maleficarum, my latest released effort, was screened privately, at the Cinemateca Boliviana by a tiny group of people that have the pompous title of Comisión de Evaluación Cinematográfica (Film Evaluation Comision) who after viewing it decided that it should be censored. This tiny group is unknown to everyone but some at the Cinemateca.
They say that Maleficarum has "explicit language" and that it should not be shown in their screens. Maybe they meant "explicit content", but it doesn't really matter, they censored it, period.
I responded to their letter with an open letter to the director of that institution, Mela Marquez. In it I simply state that a self respecting Cinemateca should be open to all kinds of films and that it's not its place to censor them.
I also noted that films with explicit content, such as Shortbus, L.A. Zombie, The Rasberry Reich, to name a few, were shown there and so I asked: Is this a discriminatory move against a Bolivian film with explicit language? Or, have the policies of the Cinemateca changed dramatically for the worst and they won't be showing films such as Salo, Antichrist, Romance and the before mentioned films again, ... ever... ?
So... Maleficarum is, for now, censored in Bolivia. Some theaters are showing interest in it, but they might find the content a bit too much for their screens.
Maleficarum is a success, for us, commercially. We're selling it very, very well. Those who want to see this film can go to our store, VermeerWorks, and get it.
Maleficarum gave us some extra cash to invest in other movies and thus we're shooting a new movie: Dead But Dreaming, with talents from both, Sirwiñakuy and Maleficarum fame.
Veronica Paintoux who had to suffer me in Sirwiñakuy was recently in La Paz, for a month, to play one of the leads in my new film.
She previously worked under my direction in Martyr where, as in Sirwiñakuy, She and I were a couple. In Dead But Dreaming you could say we're a conflictive couple. We carry this conflict for thousands of years.
She left recently after completing all of her scenes in my new film and I'm missing her already. Veronica is one of the three female protagonists in Dead But Dreaming.
Amy Hesketh, the director of Sirwiñakuy, Barbazul, Le Marquis De La Croix and lead actress in Maleficarum, has a big and difficult role to play in this new adventure, not as difficult as the one she played in Maleficarum where she was burned at the stake after suffering a lot of tortures, but a role that takes her from the fun and joy of being a spy in revolutionary times, to suffer a nasty and very public execution for her deeds.One very dramatic sequence took three days to shoot.
Her character also comes in conflict in her relationship with a male lead character who gives her a better life of sorts... after letting her go through a most horrible experience.
That very horrible experience scars her for the rest of her long and bloody life and makes her a bit of a danger to the male of the species.
That male lead that let her go through hell is me.
The other two antagonists are Beto Lopez, who is the mean inquisitor in Maleficarum and the crazy butler in Barbazul, and Eric Calancha, the torturer in Maleficarum.
Apart from the select group of actors from my ensemble, I'm working with about other 30 actors in the movie. One of them, in a lead role, is the well know Bolivian actor Jorge Ortiz.I can say that this is the most difficult film I made so far.
Once again I'm trying to use little resources to make a film that looks like I had a very big budget.
In reality, for me and my normal film expenses, this is a very big budget movie, the biggest so far... not counting Krik Krak which had external financing and it was very, very expensive.
Dead But Dreaming doesn't have any sponsors, it doesn't have outside studio funds. We do have, however, one big contributor who was inspired by what we did in Maleficarum and felt it was a worthy cause to sink in some of his hard earned cash in our adventure; but most of the resources are our own. We're financing our films with what me make from the movies we have in distribution and that make us truly independent ... and daring.
So there you have it. That's how February looks for us. And Carnival? Just a few days to take a break before we continue shooting Dead But Dreaming.
