Chronicles of a Wandering Saint | movie | 2023 | Official Featurette
In a tiny rural village in Argentina, Rita Lopez, a pious yet insatiably competitive woman, discovers that staging a mir | dG1fd0c2TEdyaXB3bjQ
Category
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Short filmTranscript
00:00 It started with this idea that I wanted to make something about somebody who was full of light,
00:04 who seemed to be perfect, but also felt really lonely in the midst of the darkness.
00:10 There's also this rural myth in Argentina that I was inspired by called "la luz mala",
00:14 which means "the bad light".
00:16 And it's something that people in the countryside say they see
00:19 when they see a flash of light in the distance in the night,
00:24 that they say that it's usually a soul that's going from one realm to the next.
00:29 And so those two things kind of came together, and then I just started writing.
00:32 I knew I wanted to make a movie that was going to be playful and light-hearted.
00:37 I wanted a movie that my grandma could watch.
00:39 That was something that always helped me think about it,
00:42 because I want to make movies that are for wider audiences.
00:45 So it was really, really hard to find that fine line between something that feels artistically exciting for me,
00:52 but also accessible for an audience.
00:54 Also, I wanted to put a lot of myself in this character.
00:58 I felt like when you're using a character as a vehicle for comedy,
01:04 I felt the only way to do it is if I put myself in her,
01:07 because the only person that I'm really allowed to make fun of is myself.
01:11 And so her quest for admiration and validation,
01:15 I was like, "All right, I'm just going to put my terrible tendencies in her,
01:21 and then be able to observe it from a distance and have fun with it."
01:24 This is, for me, genre-wise, it qualifies as magical realism.
01:28 I think that word gets tossed around a lot,
01:30 but my influences are mostly Latin American magical realism,
01:33 which tends to downplay the fantastical elements and heighten the human aspects.
01:39 The guy that also helped us worked on humongous Marvel stuff.
01:43 And so she was shooting light, left and right.
01:46 She looked like an alien. It looked amazing, but it wasn't right for the movie.
01:50 And so it was really about toning it down,
01:53 like what is the minimal version of this?
01:56 What is the third-world country version of this?
01:59 I kept thinking about that too.
02:01 It was like, how do you take fantasy and put it in a space that I know?
02:05 And I always thought, if angels and demons in the US,
02:10 they appear from the sky or in an explosion of fire,
02:15 but in Argentina, they would probably take the bus
02:18 and just show up at your door and be like, "Yo, we gotta go."
02:21 And so it was that approach that was the guiding light for how we did this.