Finding Sofía is my first feature film, we shot it in Buenos Aires and New York and debuted IN Austin Film Festival.
MIX-MEDIA ROMCOM
Synopsis
Alex is a conflicted animation filmmaker living in Brooklyn. His “Dancing Tomatoes” animation video went viral two years ago and since then Alex has been trying to prove the world he can do more than “funny videos, and dancing things”.
Pressured by his friend Josh to sign a contract with a yogurt brand to develop the “dancing fruits show” and plunge deeper into artistic superficiality Alex will, instead, buy a ticket to Argentina.
The plan is to meet with Sofia, a girl with whom he started an online relationship after she left a nasty comment about his work and who has never seen in person.
Alex’s hope to find love and substance will be confronted after finding Sofía living on an island in the outskirts of Buenos Aires with her intimidating artist boyfriend Víctor, and his assistant Flor.
Alex will be forced to be the fish out of water and try to capture Sofía’s interest or come back to his old life
and sign the contract.
Why I Decided to Shoot My First Movie in a Swamp Crowded by Mosquitoes and Stinging Caterpillars
When you’re a kid in Buenos Aires in the 80s, between 10 or 12 (you’ll know when it happens to you), El Tigre is this strange place you visited a few times with your best friend’s family. It felt like visiting a swamp in autumn.
As you grow up, you think about the fragmented memories of the place and struggle to make sense of it spatially. It’s so different from the city, yet so accessible, like falling asleep on the train and immediately dreaming of something weird.
I left Argentina at 19, spending my last years in Buenos Aires getting drunk with friends and trying to finish high school. It wasn’t until my 30s that I could afford to come back regularly and revisit all the places from my hometown. By then, my friends had rediscovered El Tigre, spending summers renting houses on its islands. El Tigre is a river delta on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, where the Paraná River, starting in the Amazon, explodes into a thousand little islands only accessible by boat, before unfolding into the Río de la Plata, and then the sea. It’s the last stop of a long journey, with things brought that don’t belong in Buenos Aires, making the place feel haunted with echoes of somewhere far away. El Tigre feels tropical somehow, but formally it’s not.
It takes time to love El Tigre. It can be tough on you at first, coming from the city. It’s basically a brown river dragging mud for a thousand years, with people building houses on that mud once the soil is hard enough, fueled by their will to escape other places.
There’s a huge difference between people born in El Tigre and those, like me, who come from the city, even though the distance is short. You enter their domain, you’re in their house. Even if you build your house there, you don’t belong. Everything in El Tigre is temporary—the trails, the islands, the houses—the river will eventually claim everything back.
My friend and writing partner Pablo Sternbach loves it there and taught me to appreciate it. I respect it too much to say I love the place. El Tigre doesn’t love you back; it just gives you a pass sometimes.
We decided to place Alex in El Tigre early in the writing process. I loved the idea of an island (Manhattan) mirroring another island (Sofía’s in El Tigre). Alex runs away from the first one and lands on the second one, only to find every fear, anxiety, yearning, and desire condensed there, like a microcosm.
Shooting there was as expected in a place where electricity goes off every other day, there’s virtually no cell phone reception, and mosquitoes are so abundant that you breathe them if you open your mouth. Once a year, El Tigre grows a plague of stinging caterpillars. They nest in the trees, and when the population overflows, they simply fall from the leaves due to lack of space. At any given moment, we could have caterpillars falling inside the shoes, shirts, and faces of the cast and crew, resulting in six minutes of intense burning pain.
A nest of stinging caterpillars in the location, climbing up to bungee jump on our heads later, once they know we’re shooting and we can’t move without ruining the take.