The disorder of memories and how they are expressed and triggered through the practice of filmmaking arise indiscriminately, influenced by the flow of past, present, and future. The filmmaker’s immigration serves as a pretext for establishing a connection with ancestors who migrated under entirely contrasting circumstances. The body is compared to a camera, the film becomes a platform for introspection, and the act of observing becomes a way of experiencing life.
Through cinema, I aim to explore the chaotic nature of memories, allowing them to be interconnected and combined on an abstract canvas of time. This approach also helps me understand how my own memories are triggered and influenced by the memories of others.
The use of senses as a catalyst is closely tied to my research. Memories seem to arise from individual emotions, and our feelings are continually stimulated by our senses and perceptions.
My methodology involves reflection followed by action. Without taking action, I have no method at all. I perceive action through my camera, my portable editing setup, paper, pencil, and microphone.
My method evolves through writing, filming, editing, and revisiting the material for constant reworking. The camera serves as a mediator in my process. I utilize it to explore questions and view the archive as both a research and cinematic object. In a way, my body becomes the camera, and I am also the archive. Spontaneous physical and technical choreography plays a role in my research.
As part of my practice, I create encounters. These involve interactions between my body and different spaces, my camera and my family, and my body and various archives (such as photos, sound recordings, decorations, furniture, and environments). I reflect on these encounters to trigger my memories using these elements. It is a constant dialogue with my personal family constellation.
I involve family members as actors in my life, and I portray myself as another character. This approach allows for a dialogue between distant and contrasting generations, spaces, and lives. I complement this with writings and recordings of my voice, using them as overlays, superimpositions, or voiceovers.
The methodology I believe I have discovered is characterized by constant movement. It needs to be unfolded gradually, embracing risks, accepting failures, returning to previous stages, and continually moving forward.
The pursuit of a purer image is my next step. By purer, I mean allowing the image to convey its own message.
This research works in my memory, in my history. And from that mist, from that (sometimes) blurred concept, I try to reflect. Always with cinema as a tool.
I would like to invite you to think about your mother, and try to put an image, any image.
Now think of your mother's mother. Your grandmother. Please try to give her an image.
And now, let's go further, to your grandmother's mother.
Is there an image? Have you ever seen her?
Do you think you could engage in a dialogue with this person?
What messages have ancestors left that are still alive in us?
What messages are we leaving when someone in the future tries to imagine us?
This haze, this terrain is where this film research gravitates.
A space of speculation that we can access through cinematographic practice.
This is the context.
A gesture of preservation of knowledge, transmission of survival knowledge.
Is there a possible timeline for memory?
A timeline where, perhaps, your memory can blends with mine.
This research provides knowledge through audiovisual pieces of different dimensions, which function as dialogues between the living and the dead using cinema as a medium and as a space for these encounters. From a single present time, a family trans-generational interaction is facilitated and shared with the audience.
Through film, I can inhabit a space of dialogue that seemed impossible.
One that can take place with and between the living and the dead. That which exists in the unknown space of memory. I can play with that speculation.
I worked with different elements of the personal archive, from family WhatsApp audios, photos, footage of the present family immigration process, the use of letters from the past and different aesthetics devices.
The gesture of researching is completely the opposite than the gesture of understanding or comprehending.
Cinema can definitely be a mediator between memories and history.
Creating visual diagrams...
I can go to the past to look forward.
Condensing elements I discovered that the combination of materials, formats, resources and memories can create a set of emotions that provoke reactions in our memory. I identify the total permeability of the material to dialogue with each other. Something that seems very basic, in my research it can be crucial since I am interested in navigating in time through different files of different formats and moments.
That is possible.
We can not separate those concepts.
Is there such a way of create coherence through some kind of order of memories?
Why is such important to create coherence regarding memories?
Life has breaks. It does not flow organically and narratively smooth.
The memories either. The memory apparently has no order.
I can use cinema as a language of connection with the memory of another and cross a bridge that joins me in a dialogue with someone I have never met.
An example of this cinematic collapse can be entering into a relationship with my father where from that point I can go to the story of two twin brothers who separated at the age of 22 and did not see each other again, but consider themselves part of the same body.
The forensic idea of treating the files and making them palpable and
defragmenting them is something I have been practicing since the first essays.
Many results are drastic interruptions, as in life itself.
My lab is the timeline, and that's where things happen.
In this essay, another trace, a physical object - a real living archive from my childhood allows me to see how that trigger activates a memory and that memory, like an endless chain, evolves into others achieving a certain narrative coherence in which the spectator can grip and dive in an associative perception.
I understood the value of movement in this research project, the direct relation it has with the immigration of my ancestors, the direct relation it has in my current immigration, and to use that inertia as a tailwind. There is something in the use of my body as a camera, in the real improvisation of what I find along the way and how these shots serve me as a canvas for certain reflections, as a stage for my writings.
The rubble of war, the rubble of memory, the rubble of life.
And that's where the false passport (another trace) with which my ancestors escaped from Odessa appeared.
Through film I try to access the fragmented story in different languages of my ancestors and at the same time inhabit the interference of a new language in my daughters.
Through this method we can leave a voice, a story and expand it in time, we can create speculative and apparent impossible dialogues.
Like the wind, memories travel, they come and go, but they also remain. What brings them? What takes them? Why do they stay? Why do they appear?
The unpredictability of my camera and what surrounds me provokes reactions in my memories, like a surface permanently uncovered to climatic changes.
The archive is perhaps the rain, or the sun.
A photo can bright my time line, my intuition, my reaction. An archive can darken my soul, it can also close the shutter of my lens. Fade out.
entity-notion-unknown
The birth of a concept that continues to grow.
Odessa is friction. It is tedium. It is language.
Odessa is trying to get to where we will never get to.
Odessa as a notion, an entity, the uncontrolled...
Mystery as an inspiring concept.
The impossible seems possible. The universal language of emotions unites us as beings.
I activate my memory through and with the memory of others. I reactivate my reality. I re-signify the perception of the past.
I am looking for connectors, I am looking for the emotional thread.
Do we need to found an specific grammar to remember?
Why?
The purpose of this research is to navigate the complexity of memories, emotions, and the memories of others and one's own, through cinema. Find a permanent source of inspiration in the archives and documentation of the present that allows us to exercise a dynamic of dialogue between different times and generations. A reflection that provokes new questions that can illuminate the intersections between cinema, history and memories in an artistic practice that is constantly evolving.
Because with this research I can make the unknown palpable, build a mental shelter, draw survival lessons, visualize them and disappear.
There is no end.
(There is a decision to finish)
As a researcher at the Netherlands Film Academy, he confronts the barriers of his knowledge and explores the limits and possibilities that cinema can offer to open a dialogue between memories, by navigating the familiar cosmology of the past, present and future. Bruno’s immigration and movement is the excuse for the connection with ancestors who migrated under absolutely opposite conditions. The body as a camera, the film as a stage for reflection, the gaze as a form of living.
He directed five TV Series including Netflix’s first Argentinian original series EDHA and the first Rede Globo’s Spanish speaking original series SUPERMAX, a co-Production between Brazil, Spain, Argentina, Colombia and Mexico. One long feature film 8 SHOTS was released in theaters in 2016, and was nominated for Best Opera Prima by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of Argentina, sold to Sony International, winner of Amsterdam Film festival with official selection in: New York Colombian Film Festival, Durango Film Festival, Hermosillo Film Festival and many others. He has recently been directing eight commissioned films in the US.
