What was you inspiration for Persona?
My inspiration was my eagerness to understand myself. When I was in the preproduction
phase of the film, I was in a long slump where I was questioning who I was as a person. As an artist who’s inspired theme is self-reflection, this was an obstruction to my filmmaking process. However, I was determined to overcome this as it was an unavoidable part to my graduation.

How did you work on the animation?
I worked with an animation program called “TV Paint”.

Why did you want to explore interpersonal relationships and social conventions in Persona?
I wanted to portray my entire self in this film. Therefore I focused on my emotions at that time. As I mentioned before, I was neglecting myself for a long time and lost self confidence and understanding of myself. I had to go to the root of it all, trying to figure myself out in a social sense and the various aspects of my existence.

How much were you interested in exploring the loss of reality?
Because it was main core of my film, I explored it quite intensely.

Would you say fake realities are more comfortable than real life? Do you have further projects in mind exploring this issue?
Even though I need courage to live true to myself, I find it more satisfying. The ending where the persona carries the husk of her real self is modeled after my own insecurity at that time. I wanted to fully show my raw emotions and fear of taking off my persona. I recently thought again about the ending of the film and realized something. The protagonist has lost something very essential internally but on the outside, it doesn’t show. Making it a truly sad and scary ending. I don’t have plans for future projects yet.

What’s your top short of all time?
My top short is Ohayo by Kon Satoshi.

What does the Festival mean to you?
I’m sorry for the character but I was able to take off my persona through making this film. I feel that the screenings at Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival give the opportunity for the audience to support and fully accept me. It gives me great courage and gratitude. Thank you for giving me this sensation of being loved. It makes me want to give back as well though my art.

Persona is being shown as part of the Lab Competition L4.

How often do you work on poetry? Did you write a part of El Sembrador de Estrellas by yourself?
I’m not used to writing poetry, just sometimes, but I like to read it a lot, and this project was a beautiful reason to start writing more. The script of this film is more an editing process of texts from different poets and philosophers, with some parts that I wrote to merge the fragments and introduce a small fiction narrative. I wanted the film to be like an aphorisms book mainly reflecting about contemplation.

How did you work on the lights and transparencies?          
It was a hard editing work that I did during the pandemic. I wanted the image to dialogue with the zen landscape paintings, where emptiness is an essential thing to maintain forms unlimited. Somehow I wanted to bring this ideas from the look to nature to an urban landscape full of lights, using the blackness of the night instead of the whiteness of the snow or the fog, to erase or hide the forms. I wanted that at some point this city of lights started to become more and more unreal, getting closer to futuristic cities in the line of Blade Runner. And this is how I started to work with the superpositions in a crazier way.

Why did you want to include the moving train and how much was its reflection in transparent water important?
Watching the movement of the train at night in Tokyo was what brought me the idea to make this film. I found a fascinating and very meditative experience looking at them crossing the emptiness. As behind the blackness, in the unseen, we don’t know what is there. I thought it could be very interesting to change the matter of this blackness: sometimes it could be solid buildings, sometimes a liquid river, some other times the air of the night sky.

Why did it have to take place in a cityscape? Do you have further films picturing this specific environment?
I reflected in my previous works about our relationship with landscape and nature, and here it was one of the challenges to work in an urban landscape. I liked the idea also that the only thing that we see in the film is artificial light, so not even the light is natural.

What’s your favourite short?          
Szél (Wind), 1996, by Marcell Iványi. It’s a very powerful work, with a great conceptual idea in terms of cinema language. He made it as a school work and ended winning the Palme d’or at Cannes.

What does the Festival mean to you? 
It means a lot. I won one award here in 2014 with my short film Montaña en Sombra, and came the year after as a jury member of Lab. It’s the greatest short film festival, we all work hard to try to be selected here.

El Sembrador de Estrellas [The Sower of Stars] is being shown as part of the Lab Competition L5.

What inspired you to make A Short Story?
The inspiration for the script is the bedtime stories I often made up for my children. I keep notes of the interesting ones.

How long did you work on the script before starting to shoot? How much space did you leave for improvisation?
We spent about a month on the script. We then spent another two weeks making changes based on the result of the set conditions. When the official shooting began, we were improvising at every take based on unexpected changes we encountered daily. I hadn’t fixed up my mind on the last scene where the black cat and the little girl meet. They were to meet inside of a house according to the original script. It didn’t feel right. We took an additional day for a makeup shot and decided they would meet at the top of a moving escalator. 

How did you work on the film’s atmosphere and its sets?
Mostly by leveraging on the physical sets and props in order to create additional texture for the film. For instance, the scene of the bot was shot in an abandoned bathroom. We blanked the white tiles with sheets of transparent plastic and colored glass.

What’s your favourite short?
Chris Marker’s La Jetée.

What does the Festival mean to you?
A distant gathering.

A Short Story is being shown as part of the Lab Competition L3. 

How did you construct your narrative from the VR chats in The Phantom Touch? Did you approach users with the project already in mind?      
The narrative was built along the way, as when I started I was not sure what the documentary was going to be about. I just knew I wanted to explore and feel the virtual reality world of VRChat. I told the users I was making a film of course, and as time went on conversations about the doubts of the future and lack of purpose were some that repeated frequently, and ones me and my team wanted to explore in depth. But the overall narrative and structure was created as we went along.

What does the bird appearance choice mean?
Choosing an avatar is an interesting thing, as you choose the form with which you present to the other users. I think that the melancholy and general vibes of the bird avatar resonated with me, but I can’t really say why. It just felt like a right fit for me. Also, having a “cute” avatar makes people be more open to talking with you, as they empathize more easily with seeing a funny looking character.

How much are you interested in virtual realities? Do you have further projects in VR?
Virtual realities, the metaverse and the internet are things that I’m very much interested to explore in my work. We live in a very digital reality, even if we don’t acknowledge it, and VR is just the next step of this. That may sound a bit radical for many people, but it’s an extension of what came before. I currently don’t have a project in VR, but I’m writing a TV show that has parts that happen in a virtual reality world, expanding on some ideas and themes that were featured in The Phantom Touch.

While working on The Phantom Touch, have you considered recording your everyday life and chatting with relatives in real life?            
The idea did cross my mind, and could be an interesting one. One of the things I like more about The Phantom Touch is the intimacy that you get in every one of the conversations featured, and I do wonder if I could replicate that in real life. But the fact is that in the digital world you don’t carry a camera or a microphone, so there’s not the intimidating factor that always comes up when you put a camera in front of someone.

What’s your favourite short?
The Wrong Trousers, the second Wallace and Gromit short. It’s one very dear to me, and I was fascinated with it while growing up. It was very revelatory too, in the sense that I was introduced to a new form of animation and filmmaking as a child. I still watch it every now and then and I always appreciate the craftsmanship and work that was put into it.

What does the Festival mean to you?
It means a lot, and it’s very important for me as a director. This is my first film, and being able to showcase it outside of Chile, my home country, to such a large audience from all over the world is very exciting and I can’t wait to be there.

The Phantom Touch is being shown as part of the Lab Competition L5.

Where and when does Paradiso, XXXI, 108 take place?
Paradiso, XXXI, 108 is taking place in Al-Naqab desert, in the south of Palestine.

From which material did you get the military pictures? Did you do editing?
The material is coming from films commissioned by the Israeli Army. They were didactic, educational propaganda films, where basically being in the army meant to look very entertaining and full of learning. The whole concept of the film is in the editing, which allowed me to subvert the material by changing the order of scenes and actions, by exasperating the iteration of mechanical activities through which these war games are questioned and seem senseless. But in some scenes the editing was kept as it is because it served the idea of the film. Also the narration in Hebrew was taken from the original material and, despite the fact that it is fictitious, it is a document that testifies to a certain state of mind.

What did you have in mind when making the soundtrack of the film?
First I was interested in the mechanical aspect of human beings, and, more specifically, of an apparatus of destruction, the army. The sound gives you the feeling of that and builds up the tension. Like the “Danse Macabre”, which is a music that already talks and reflects on human nature, as its title reveals. In a way this is what we see. While I used Haendel’s “Sarabande” for delivering a kind of melancholy for all that is going wrong with humanity, which always pays the price for being at war and creating systems that are enforcing destruction. Surely this film is showing a specific place and a specific case, but I think it is a reflection on humanity itself and on its failure. Then there are some parts in the film where we are using Suleiman Gamil’s music (“Pharaoh Funeral Process”, “Isis Looks for Osiris”) that in a certain way is the sound of this landscape. The sound of the flute is coming again and again, like the wind, it is almost what this landscape is telling: you cannot defeat me. This area of Palestine has been very affected both by using a large part of it as army bases for exercises and by creating settlements and, by doing so, changing the nature of the place. Where there is desert, in many places in the world, it has been used to exercise, to test bombs and finally destroy the landscape itself. In the material we never see the people: the enemy is always supposedly hiding behind the hills, or between ruins, but we never see it. Nevertheless the soldiers continue bombing and maneuvering and attacking again and again with their power forces. This whole thing that the enemy is not to be seen is also quite symbolic: it’s the way the Palestinians, are perceived in many aspects of their life, as non-existing and temporary. Yet the “state” is set to look for them, in a way the material testify for this ideology, they are there and not there. They are not being recognized as human beings and the army attempts at the same time to fight them, which is in itself very contradictory and prone to failure.

Is there a sequel to Paradiso, XXXI, 108? Do you have further projects dealing with this issue?
The film was born out of another project we are still editing called A Fidai Film, and in that sense what we see in Paradiso, XXXI, 108 is just one aspect of a work of sabotage that I do to archival materials. A Fidai Film deals with the looting of archives, of a culture, of an entire country, and which is still going on. The film is a visual treatment of all of this. Working with archives allows me to study images and find patterns. In A Fidai Film there are a couple of sequences where we see exercises of the army from different times, and where they attack ruins, empty of humans. There is something very strange about using old and ancient structures to exercise an occupation. Making it in some ways symbolic for the whole story of Palestine, and not only in modern times.

What’s your favourite short?
I would say Homage by Assassination by Elia Suleiman (1992). To me it is one of the best short films of all time. It is his first movie he made in New York.

What does the Festival mean to you?
I have always heard about this festival and I am very happy that my film was selected in your program. What I really love about the Clermont-Ferrand short film festival is the idea of having a place that focuses on and supports short films, which to me manage to deliver the most experimental ideas in cinema. This is both because of their length, which most of the time makes them the most difficult to produce and support, but also gives them the freedom to be independent.

Paradiso, XXXI, 108 is being shown as part of the Lab Competition L2. 

What prompted you to make a film about the issues raised by the messages left by Anathematic Anarchist? Do you plan to make other films addressing these issues?
My initial desire was to make a film about the solitude specific to digital capitalism through the example of dating apps. But when I found and read Anathematic’s suicide letter, which moved me a lot, I decided to introduce incels as a focal point. They embody for me a very dark human desolation, linked to the social atomization produced by the Internet and screens. I wanted to explore their emotions, which resonated with me in an unexpected way, because I too have often found myself terribly alone behind the screen of my mobile phone, obsessed with its illusion of connectivity and sociability. Young people – of my generation, Gen Y, but it is even worse for Gen Z – are spending less and less time with their friends, making love less, and are more depressed and anxious than ever. Personally, I am convinced that the cause of all these sad transformations is the same: digital platforms, and the virtualization and increasing automation of our existences. My second short film, HODL, deals with another very masculine virtual community, one which revolves around cryptocurrencies. In making La Mécanique des fluides, I also realized the contradictions and complexity of masculinity as a socio-cultural construction. In approaching these communities, I want to understand how they contribute to the production of a patriarchal masculinity that seems dangerous for both women and men.

How did you construct the narration, and organize the videos and virtual space excerpts?
The narrative was constructed organically as I found documents on the Internet, researched incels, dating apps, and the effects of algorithms on our subjectivity (especially Eva Illouz and bell hooks, but also Judith Duportail and many scientific articles on the manosphere). After a long process of theoretical research and field investigation, I wrote a voice-over that gave the film its first structure, but I rewrote and rearranged it based on the videos and material I gradually found on the Internet. The problem – and the advantages – of working with the Internet as an archive is that it is a process that is endlessly open to serendipity.

Do you organise any activities beyond simply showing the film, such as art exhibitions, public meetings, or online or social network debates?
The film has already been turned into a video installation for an exhibition at the Filmwinter Festival in Stuttgart, where we presented it next to a print of the complete Anathematic letter (which is not shown in its entirety in the film). There have been public meetings at festivals and other screenings, but I would really like there to be more presentations of the film in the activist feminist community, as I am very interested in what kind of debates the film might spark in those circles.

Have you considered turning La Mécanique des fluides into “spam”, proposing or integrating it into algorithms, etc.?
Given the subject matter, I was afraid of being harassed by masculinists if they discovered the film. I even considered not signing it with my own name at one point. However, it is very important to me, from a political standpoint, that the film be seen as much as possible, that the issues it addresses be discussed. Becoming viral in this sense would be comforting, as I believe the film addresses a growing misogyny that should be part of the public debate as a matter of urgency. But I still have doubts about the film’s public future. The possibility of eventually injecting it back into the same circulation circuit from which it is in a way derived, i.e. YouTube – and thus closing the loop – appeals to me as much as it scares me.

What’s your favourite short?
That’s a very difficult question… I greatly admire the theoretical and artistic production of Hito Steyerl. In France, Gabrielle Stemmer and Chloé Galibert-Laîné have made films that have inspired me a lot (Clean With Me (After Dark) and Forensickness, among others).

What does the Festival mean to you?
It is a wonderful opportunity for the short film to be seen, to engage with the audience and other filmmakers about it, to meet other artists and discover their films. The Lab program, in particular, seems amazing and it is a real honor to be part of it.

La Mécanique des fluides [The Mechanics of Fluids] is being shown as part of the Lab Competition L4. 

How much are you interested in urbanization? Do you have further projects on this topic?
I studied architecture in Dhaka, maybe that’s why I’m interested in urbanism and urbanization. I used to think Dhaka would become a well-designed city and it’s possible. Surely, it was a utopia. But utopia is important for the future. I saw rapid urbanization in Dhaka and now it’s the most densely inhabited city in the world. Sometimes I wonder how to make a film about a place that I hate living in. So, my interest in urbanization is a bit scattered. I’m working on another feature-length documentary project titled Making Places, related to this topic – urbanization. Also, I’m developing a fiction project about a young student in the background of urbanization in Dhaka.

Why do you think your protagonists leave rural areas if they have so much nostalgia for it?
My protagonists leave rural areas in search of work. I guess it’s common all over the world. Also, our rural areas are still underdeveloped in terms of civic infrastructure. Our villages are extremely green compared to our ugly unplanned cities. So, in the mind of the citizens, a city is something which is bad and ugly. It’s a temporary place and eventually citizens will go back to their villages. This is the fantasy my protagonists have. I think it’s because we don’t know what a city is or can be. We only observed rapid urbanization. We don’t have a good example of urbanism here that we can follow. Or maybe we just can’t design our rapidly urbanized cities from scratch. My father has this severe nostalgia for his village too. He started farming there after his retirement. At the same time, he can’t stay in his village for more than two weeks. In his passport his permanent address is his village house not the apartment where he lives in Dhaka.

Do you live in Dhaka yourself? Are there places you enjoy in the city?
I live in Dhaka. I hate to say Dhaka has very little public spaces. I like areas in Dhaka where I can enjoy some sort of public space. Places where I can sit without paying anyone. Again, we don’t understand the concept of public space here in the city. Everything is private or gated here – even the public parks.

Do you think concrete could be domesticated? And do you think nature is actually domesticated?
Building a house is essential for our existence in this world. We need a sense of enclosure where we can live. Animals make their shelter in nature too. Maybe we need to find a balance between the wild and domestic.

What’s your favourite short?
I watched a lot of shorts at my film institute in India. Those are mostly narrative shorts. Once my teacher showed a short documentary called Before My Eyes by Mani Kaul. It was commissioned by the tourism board of Kashmir in India. But the film was nothing like a tourism film. Somehow, I vividly remember this short now. It was like a meditative landscape documentary. A mosaic of static, floating shots over the majestic landscape of Kashmir and sounds from the valley. He used such amazing off-screen sound elements that opened up a different world while watching the landscape of Kashmir. And we hardly see any people in the film.

What does the Festival mean to you?
Though I never visited the Festival, I know it’s a short film festival with great programming and a serious audience. Also, I’m eager to explore the short film industry activities and the Market.

Fantasy in a Concrete Jungle is being shown as part of the Lab Competition L4.

How did you get the inspiration for Pentola?
Although Pentola may seem like a pretty silly film (and it certainly is!), it stems from a very personal story. A few years ago I totally fell in love with a man, and found myself facing for the first time a thousand problems, questions and doubts that I had never faced before. In the same period, I was also obsessed with the idea of loser superheroes with useless superpowers, I don’t know why but they amused me so much. If we consider everything we don’t expect to be able to do in everyday life to be a superpower, then it means that each one of us can be a superhero in our own way. At that time I also discovered “Superman”, a song by Giovanni Truppi about how a man cheats on his girlfriend with Superman. I really wanted to tackle this theme with an ironic and light tone. Then all the ideas crossed in a very natural way and gave shape to my little Pentola.

Which animation technique(s) have you used?
Pentola is made entirely in 2D computer animation. However, I wanted to give it a very analogue and handcraft effect to make the story a little more intimate and personal.

How much are you interested in the different forms of love? Do you have further projects on this topic?
Maybe I am a bit stupid and cheesy but I think love is a wonderful thing that is always worth talking about. As long as it moves me, I think I will continue to do so.  After all, we are all just looking for something to warm us up a bit. This is what my next project will be about.

Is Pentola more about getting out of conformism or about feeling empowered and heartened by love?
I think this goes hand in hand in the film. To get out of a standardised and stagnant situation, Pentola needs the push and courage that love can give you to get out of it.

What’s your favourite short?
Hehe, I have no idea! The first one that comes to mind is Manivald by Chintis Lundgren, which blows my mind.

What does the Festival mean to you?
I am definitely super happy to be selected in this Festival edition because of the prestige it brings, of course. But at the same time I am genuinely happy for every initiative that gives space to the short film form, which is still undervalued in the world of cinema. Thank you!

Pentola is being shown as part of the Lab Competition L2.

Why did you choose this topic?
I was reading about Jung’s concept of the shadow, the part of our psyche that remains hidden and uncontrollable to our conscious mind. I was inspired to portray someone’s shadow as a cartoony gnome who takes control of their life. Also I was moved by psychologist Péter Popper’s idea that a serial monogamist resembles a serial murderer in some ways.

What was your process to determine which external elements would picture the character’s inner feelings, such as water?
In my understanding I was using very basic and archetypal symbolism: the car falls off a cliff to show fall from grace, red-tainted swamp water signifies subconscious, which then erupts from the sewer system, the gnome signals unmanaged childhood trauma, etc. I guess the giant underground insect queen presiding over a party is some communal, Dionysian subconscious monster.

What are your influences?
Animation: Yuasa, Mulloy, Plympton and the whole 1990s Cartoon Network scene. Film: Kubrick, the Cronenbergs, Ken Russell. Books: Nabokov, Szepes, Solzhenitsyn to name a few, plus several friends and youtubers.

How important was the psychiatrist sequence? Could it have been a hairdresser sequence for example?
I needed the protagonist to try to consciously access his subconscious – the psychiatrist is a very recognizable gatekeeper for that endeavour. It could have been a shaman or simply a dream sequence – perhaps in a hairdresser’s chair, why not? The sharp barber tools could help dramatize the scene.

What’s your favourite short?
It’s impossible to answer, but the one looped in my head is Play like a Driver by Manabu Himeda.

What does the Festival mean to you?
Well, animation friends who have been there praise the Festival. I haven’t been there yet and sadly, I will miss it this year too, but the selection I saw from last year was really good.

Amok is being shown as part of the Lab Competition L4.

Did you use an in-camera editing technique, without additional elements? Is it for you an experiment or a routine?
The film is really just one continuous take with no hidden cuts. It was an experiment and ended up working in the very last take of the only shoot day we had. But it is definitely also part of my filmmaking process. I like films that give the viewer time to wander and discover. The only thing we added in post production were a few clouds to add some movement to the image.

How much are you interested in immigrant work conditions and do you have further projects on this topic?
I care about making films about it, since it’s the environment I grew up in. It’s not so much a conscious decision, but these are the kinds of characters I’m fascinated by. I come from generations of blue collar workers, and have the privilege to be able to make films. So naturally my films will be inspired by them.

How important was the mountainous environment for you to set Please Make it Work? 
It was an integral part from the moment I had the initial idea. I wanted to observe the human drama when put in contrast to the magnitude of nature and time. The film was part of the Locarno Spring Academy, and I really wanted the mountain environment of the Alps to be at the core of the film.

Were you more interested in the exploration of the mother-daughter relationship or in depicting the rage coming from the addition of vexations?
Both. They are connected in my mind. As an immigrant worker you are constantly away working and have little time to be present at home. As a consequence there is a big friction between first and second generation immigrants. Being a present parent is really a luxury.

What’s your favourite short?
Since I answered this question here last year, I will go with my favorite short that I watched in the last year. It’s a short film from Kosovo called Displaced by Samir Karahoda.

What does the Festival mean to you?
Clermont-Ferrand is very special to me. I had such a great experience here last year and am honored to be back.

Please Make It Work is being shown as part of the Lab Competition L5.