by Dov Kornits
So, how was lockdown for you, Luis? “Mimi Lazo, producer and lead actor of our film (and my wife), told me during the first week of lockdown in Los Angeles, while I was immersed on my phone reading the news: ‘We should use our devices to tell our stories and connect with others, especially now, when we’re more isolated than ever’. That was the starting point of our creative process that led to our film Unknowns.”
The first project that he has ever made using a smartphone, Unknowns turned out to be a creative gateway for the filmmaker.
“After Mimi set the premise of telling stories by ‘hacking’ into the devices of our protagonists, she called brilliant writer and friend Monica Montañés, in Madrid, and phenomenal actor Veronica Oddó in Santiado de Chile, and we workshopped this idea together. We wanted to create something that could bring others into the equation, actors from different cities, live audiences, and an amazing and challenging door opened before us.”
One of the main themes that Luis loves to explore in his work is displacement, which the premise for Unknowns suited perfectly. “This opportunity to tell a story by Monica Montañés about the loss of identity that comes with having to leave your home, your family, your country, your house, is the story of 7 million Venezuelans scattered all over the world,” he says. “This has been a very personal project, but we’ve found out that telling our stories about finding ourselves in foreign places is the same story of so many that like us are doing their best to start over and rekindle their own identity, sometimes in the most adverse of circumstances.”
How did he find the experience of directing people via zoom? “We didn’t know how to approach it but by trial and error, at some level, isolated in our homes and afraid about what was going on out there, this creative challenge kept us grounded. We came up with the idea of rehearsing via zoom, then inviting 312 people from 19 cities in 10 countries via zoom to be our live audience, as we captured our scenes with live performances. Mimi was then in Madrid, Veronica in Chile and Nina Rancel in Los Angeles, yet they where, in the story, in one apartment. We worked to visually create that illusion. Then, the zoom experience, rehearsing and performing live, was more intimate than expected, and we rolled with it. In the end, it didn’t matter where were we physically, we were there, together, connected, and it was real and powerful. It worked for the sake of storytelling.”
Arriving in Australia for the first time to present Unknowns at our leading smartphone film festival, SF3, Luis Fernandez is excited about being able to interact with audiences and creatives face to face, and seeing their film on the big screen.
“Unknowns has been doing the rounds in film festivals and doing quite well. We showcase it in our own platform mimilazo.net every Sunday with some scenes performed live and after every “performance”, we let our virtual audience open their cameras and mics and tell us their own personal stories about migration. It’s been surprisingly therapeutic and healing, so we plan on continuing doing it. Of course, we also dream about seeing this experiment thrive in bigger screens, and the amazing and very relevant SmartFone Flick Fest has been quite a stepping stone in that possibility.”
Unknowns is screening at the 8th annual SF3 SmartFone FlickFest on Sunday November 6, 2022 at the Actors Centre in Leichhardt, Sydney. Click here for tix.