Hear
“I am from the Tres Esquinas neighborhood / old bastion of a suburb / where the pretty girls in aprons bloom like wisteria”sings Enrique Cadícamo’s tango with a good flow of voice. These words fit the filmmaker Fernando Spinerborn exactly there ago sixty-five years old, in Barracasmore precisely at the intersection of Montes de Oca and Osvaldo Cruz, where the railway station existed…
Of course, due to the vagaries of life, it did not take that long for the moccasins of that Buenos Aires native raised among malevos to give way to bare feet in the sands of Villa Gesell. “Now I’m in Buenos Aires, but I have to go back to see my daughter who is there and finish filming.” Wesermy next film. It will be named after the ship my great-grandfather came on to escape from the pogroms of Ukraine in 1884. He arrived alone from kyiv because his fiancée had escaped with her family months earlier. And so he came to meet her again. After arriving at the port of Buenos Aires they settled in Carlos Casares. My grandmother Rebeca was born there, I met her and had a very loving relationship with her. Her story says that she had married a Spiner and they went to Villa Gesell in the early 50’s, she remembers with deep feeling, the same one that she transmits both in her life and in her films.
Fernando seems to be inspired when he talks about Villa Gesell, which he enjoyed as a child: “We spent the summer there since my brother, who is five years older than me, was born. At that time it was a beautiful little town too, but it was ten blocks long.. At the end of the 60’s my parents decided to move. Dad had a pharmacy in Barracas and the change was resounding. December would come, he would take off my shoes and put them back on in March. For me it was an adventure among sandy streets, a place with a lot of mystique, linked to freedom, hippiesbackpackers…”.
-And how did you come from Gesell to study film at the Centro Sperimentale Di Cinematografía of Cinecittá, Rome, Italy, with teachers such as Gianni Amelio, Carlo Di Palma, Furio Scarpelli and Roberto Perpignani?
-I came to Gesell when I was 12 and I went to high school. The key was that my father really liked cinema. In fact, one of the stories I tell in The Buoy, one of my films, revives its history a little with my mother’s story. He was a very reading person, passionate about cinema, but in Buenos Aires he worked in the pharmacy, it was his way of subsistence. When she and her mother were sold, he started studying Philosophy and started a poetry workshop with Noé Jitrik and another painting workshop with Alberto Delmonte, and her life changed dramatically. I witnessed how art made him flourish; That is in The Buoy which has as its flag the idea of transcendence through artistic expression. That work was nominated as Best Documentary Film in 2018 and also had a very good run at festivals such as Punta del Este.
-His father was his source of inspiration…
-It’s true, my father was one of those who supported a lot a film club that existed in the early 70s in Gesell where 16mm films were shown. Also during Holy Week there was a meeting of Super 8 film makers. That served as a guide. And I began to study through some friends, whose father was a distributor, the Portelas. I found out that David José Kohon, a director from the 60s generation with many films and great actors, gave courses. I went and it lasted only two classes, because it was AAA time, they threatened him with death and he went into exile. So that germ remained in me and then I continued. Those were times when there was only the Film Institute school…
-That’s how it started, but how did it get to Europe?
-It was with my first trip when I was 20. I discovered that the Experimental Center of Cinematography School existed and that an entrance exam was open. I prepared myself, I signed a short film that was very important, Chain witnesseswhich in a somewhat metaphysical way speaks of the dictatorship. I had studied Italian and I went to Rome alone in 1982. I was lucky, they gave me a scholarship.. It was a time when many of the great authors of Italian cinema were still alive making films. Also, there is a law in Italy that establishes that there must always be graduates on filming, so it was a beautiful experience. I became very devoted to that cinema, Even today I still have great contact with all of my former colleagues. It is almost 40 years since we graduated in 1985. At that time we were 50 students, 30 Italians and 20 foreigners, so I had Greek, Belgian and Polish classmates…
-Do you return to Buenos Aires to apply everything you had learned?
-Indeed, the first things I did were a short film starring Luis Alberto Spinetta, no less, Ballad for a Kaiser Carabela. It was incredible because I was an admirer of Almendra, Pescado Rabioso, Invisible, a big fan of him. Then we did City of poor hearts with Fito Páeza full-length video. Both were all the rage at the time.
-And the opportunity came to him on TV with Bajamar, the coast of silence, Poliladron, Risk zone, You will reap your sowingfor which he received the Konex Award for best TV director of the decade, had you imagined it?
-Not really, but it went very well. It was a great experience to start applying issues related to cinema to new formats like video. First with two musicians of such high standing. And then I started to introduce some ideas from cinema applied to television. There I was lucky enough to meet great actors, directing Jorge Marrale, Osvaldo Laport, Luisa Kuliok, Leonardo Sbaraglia, the debut of Julieta Díaz, Carlos Santamaría and many others, all very good and several with more experience than me. It was a great testing ground for me. I keep remembering names of other greats like Lorenzo Quinteros, Lito Cruz, Cristina Banegas, the debuts of Inés Estévez and Diego Peretti… You don’t know what it meant to me to also get to work in the cinema as assistant director to Eduardo Mignogna and with a great thinker like Alberto Ure, theater director, exceptional playwright.
-How was the experience? Polithief?
-Another event where I had the possibility of applying all the experience that I had been bringing from cinema to TV in an independent production. I think what I brought to the project was the idea of an art director, a photography director, real locations, an editor and a film sound engineer with post-production time. All added to a cinematographic story that I had been testing in previous works and that here I was able to carry them forward with special effects included. It was cinema on TV. Then I started preparing Low tide…
-Did you get off for any special reason? Police thief?
-Look, it’s been so long that I don’t even remember. I didn’t fight with anyone. I always had very extreme experiences with many people from film and television. They are cultural industries where the artistic is mixed with the industrial, and it is always very easy for conflicts to arise.
-And he returned to Gesell…
-To make a series of documentaries in tribute to the pioneers of Villa Gesell together with my great friend and partner of The BuoyAníbal Zaldívar, which was a historical record of the town. I was able to meet them all. We had the chance to interview them and that work remained forever. It can be seen in the Museum of the Town.
-Your movie Aballay, the man without fearbased on the story by Antonio Di Benedetto, also won multiple awards.
-It was very exciting for me. It took me twenty years to make it until I was able to make it. I kept putting it off, but it happened thanks to a Bicentennial award from the National Film Institute that I won in 2008. Pablo Cedrón had a great lead role and Claudio Rissi had a sublime performance, which launched him as a tremendous villain. A great cast with Luis Ziembrowski, El Puma Goity, Nazareno Casero, Horacio Fontova, Moro Anghileri, Aníbal Guiser (El Mono que Piensa), Lautaro Delgado… It was very well received, it represented Argentina at the Oscars in 2011. We also won the Sur Awards, Cóndores de Plata… A very Argentine film in a genre that took up the gaucho tradition, as Lucas Demare did with Pampa Bárbara and Leonardo Favio with Juan Moreira.
-He told me before starting the talk that his daughter also inherited the passion for cinema…
-It looks like it is. Natalia is currently living in Gesell. She makes music for movies, for example The Buoy, Immortal, Exquisite Corpse and for television The Seven Fools and the Flamethrowers, adaptation of Roberto Arlt’s novels by Ricardo Piglia. He also has his band, but now he is doing the music for an Argentine director who lives in Los Angeles. She is in love with the sea like me. My brother, who is a doctor, also lives in Gesell with his entire family. My parents died there… And I still haven’t told you that in Gesell I had my first job related to the world of images as a beach photographer for the photography house “The short-sighted clam.”
-Tell me also about your wife, a renowned actress.
-That’s right, Sofía Viruboff, she worked a lot in cinema, she is the protagonist of La Sonámbula, she is also in Bajamar, she worked with María Luisa Bemberg in Miss Mary and in many movies like The city of your final destiny, The Stranger, Kafka’s lovesmade several in France…
-As a media person, what is your opinion on the controversy that arose regarding the government’s decision to paralyze the activity of the National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts (INCAA)?
-I wouldn’t have been able to make any of the films I made without their support. It’s a very democratic entity because the projects are presented and selected by a committee of film people that rotates constantly. The budgets and their financing possibilities are evaluated in a very responsible manner and the investment must be returned in a very reliable and responsible manner. Also, we mustn’t forget that it’s an industry that employs a lot of people.
-Are you looking forward to summer so you can return to the city that adopted you?
-The truth is that, since I am filming Weser ,I go and come. But summer for me represents a tradition. With my friend Aníbal Zaldívar we have a ritual that consists of swimming to a buoy that we put out to sea about 500 meters from the coast, like in our movie… I can’t help it, when the good weather approaches I start to think carefully. anxiety in the pleasure of swimming in the sea…
