Adrian Saba He grew up among theaters and cinemas accompanying his father Edgar Saba, founder of the Lima Film Festival. He is now premiering his third film, a black comedy he has called Toribio Bardelli’s Erection.
With his first films he traveled to festivals, and on one occasion, in Berlin – in the edition in which Meryl Streep attended – he thought he could have achieved better shots. “Now I’m happy, but during filming and post-production we were being very rigorous with the film what I wanted to tell. Now I see her calm.”
If with The cleaner (2013) spoke of post-apocalyptic Lima and with The dreamer (2017) told the story of a young man in a gang, now it addresses grief through a patriarch in his seventies, who lives alone and disconnected from his children: a communicator waiting for the publication of her first article, an actor unemployed and a young blind woman who could not pay the rent for her room.
“I was interested in telling the story of a dysfunctional family. It is not only the mourning for the loss of a family member, It is a duel with existence. Each character has a half-finished life and is searching for his own identity, reconciliation with his life, right? While it is an abstract topic, it is just what I wanted to explore,” she responds over the phone.
Although it was filmed in 2019, watching the film after the pandemic may have a different meaning, he agrees. It is about a middle class family, with nothing defined and even navigating hopelessness. “They are like unhappy dreamers. However, there is a need to find hope.” We see Gustavo Bueno in scenes filmed in the Historic Center as ‘Toribio’, a widower who borders on obsession with demonstrating his virility. “He is an icon of our cinematographySo working with him was a dream. Conversations with him began very early, with the first writing of the script. “I think one can conceive of the film as a critique of traditional masculinity, but it transcends that.”
Gustavo Bueno. With Ponce de León and Sánchez Patiño and Michele Abascal. Photo: diffusion
Saba manages to have the remembered one in some scenes Coco Chiarella and Víctor Prada, the protagonist of his most notable film. “We have a lot of extraordinary actors, but not the number of films in which they can act. We always talk to Víctor, it is 10 years since the premiere of The Cleaner and we will have performances,” he says about the screenings today, Wednesday and Friday at the CCPUCP.
Although Toribio Bardelli’s The Boner competed only with Bachelorette 2 and Uncrowned Queens, the Oscar campaign begins before the end of the year and each country employs an ‘advertising machine’. In 2021, Melina León told us that the promotion of Canción sin nombre did not start on time due to bureaucracy.
“We are looking for the resources, if everything goes well, in November I would be in Los Angeles promoting the movie. But the times are uncertain,” Saba comments on the matter and tells us that he would be in three international festivals.
At the moment, in Peru it premieres on October 26 with theaters and schedules yet to be defined. “I still think that many things are needed for Peruvian cinema. Distribution is a quite complex art, just because you have more theaters does not mean that things will be better for you, but we are very happy with V&R Films so I hope everything goes well. When I start to think about that (in the run of a production) I say how many years of my life reduced to an hour and a half! (laughs). I hope the film stays in the minds and hearts of the viewer.”
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