Wednesday 17 July 2019

Interview with filmmaker Jorge Mario Zuleta

You Ain't Talking About This is screening at Straight-Jacket Guerrilla Film Festival

*How did you get into making films?
I see myself flowing between Punk and Dadá. I feel that movies are the proper canvas for me. This might be result of ingest of several hours of TV as a child. Those TV grids used to be packed with exciting eerie plots about supernatural matters and weird adventures.
As a young adult, I spent a lot of time reading and writing scripts trying to capture the strangest situations I could imagine, aiming to strange twists and turns. At school I started to learned how to loose it all, letting the chaos reign my work.
In recent years I have reviewed old formats such as half-inch tape. The richness found in the vintage frame led me to evoke the person of Marimar, the main character in this story. After all, Costa Rica is a place rich in shores.

*What inspired you to make your movie?
At first I did not expect to make a long movie based on this story, but Stachy DJ's amazing sound adventures encouraged me to understand that this was the correct length for this tale.

*How has your style evolved?
At school I became fond of surrealism. In the same way that this movement has a great variety of styles; my journey have me sometimes into colorful and hard geometric abstraction and, sometimes, to the scope of the Theater of the Absurd.
However, I try to keep the courage to face the production of constant visual challenges permanently, as kind of a mantra.

*The Misrule Film Movement & Pink8 manifesto bring what to mind?
It reminds me that I am a believer. I am a believer in the creative process. I believe that an ethic of audiovisual art is possible. I believe it because I wrote a Manifesto myself, a younger and more naive me. The name was "Manifesto por the Video Vacio" -"Manifesto for an Empty Video", roughly translated-. The evolution of my work would be much more difficult to understand if I had not written my principles at that time. In that text I was trying to state my current methods to approach to Dadá Films.

*What can we expect from your next film?
I am currently making a short music video. At first I thought I would do a computer algorithmic based animation, but the subject led me to make a treatment with much more texture. Now the project is a stop motion animation. However, production has been a bit slow, actually. The issue is the migration of war. I hope that when I go back to review this brief interview I have finished it.