Interview: Pablo Torre

I spoke with Pablo Torre after a screening of The Face of the Angel on April 9th. He kindly obliged me by speaking for the most part in English. His command of English is much better than he himself would let on, yet I have edited a little to try to help out for both style and flow.

--Tell me about the story that begins the film.

It's a story from Hans Christian Anderson. A wolf wants to eat a family of little lambs. One day, the wolf goes into the house and takes the lambs. The littlest lamb hides in a clock and escapes. This story is then adapted for the larger narrative. This boy hides in a clock as his mother is killed, then ultimately goes and kills the wolf who is his father. That was a change to some degree from what has happened in my country, where no one has killed the killers. One man we are definitely portraying is Astiz, who is a real person.

--He is killed in the film. But he is still alive in real life.

Yes, he is still alive. And he is free. But he can't leave the country, because French Justice and other organizations are looking for him.
We had many difficulties making the film. Most obviously, there was money. The boys were wards of other people, and I had big war scenes. In cinema this is expensive.
Also, in Argentina no one wants to talk about the military process. I filmed in Cordova, in the interior, far from Buenos Aires. Some people cooperated. The church gave me everything, for example the clothes for the priests, and helped out by providing locations. During the proceso, the church and the military government worked together, but today they don't think the same thing. The church wants to change, but the military officers want to go in the same direction.

--You yourself were not of the generation of the Malvinas war, which had a lot to do with the downfall of the proceso. You changed the story from your own period to theirs so that you could narrate the period from 1976 to 1983.

The characters in the film are younger. I am forty-seven years old now, and they are thirty-seven or thirty-eight.

--This film is quite direct. There is no allegory, and does not dance around the military process. You think this is good or bad?

First it's just observation, an objective issue. But to my mind it is good to see it represented explicitly. In Argentina, people think that it's sobre entendido; that you don't need to talk about it. I think we do need to talk about it.

--One central issue in the film is the portrait of this boy called a "mixto," who is menaced by everyone. Could you clarify what "mixto" means.

Mixto means children who come from a marriage of Jews and Christians. You are part Jewish and part Christian. In my childhood as well, boys who are homosexual, or delicate, or timid, they too were always called "mixto." I don't know why. A mixture between man and woman, perhaps. In the film, this is my role. When I was in a school like this one, all the boys beat up on me. I am the mixto in the film. This is my persona. I am not Nicolas. I am not Velazquez. I am the mixto.

--At one point in the film, the mixto leaves. The way I understood it was that he was "disappeared." Maybe he went back to his family. But I presumed that he was killed. You survived.

Well, I'm the mixto. I tried to make it so that the mixto was remembering this history. Nicolas and Velazquez in a certain part of the story, they both represent death. And then the mixto is challenging them. The story changes to some degree when the mixto leaves. And this relates as well to how the film was shot. When I filmed the first part of the film, I wasn't sure if there would be a second part. It was not written. So I changed things around a little when I made the second part.

--How far did the first part you shot go? Was it just the beginning story with the clock?

There was the story of the clock, and then the child in the school. I didn't know what happened with these boys, with Nicolas and Velazquez. I was not sure. I think they both died. In part the film was my imagining what happened to them.

--There is very little talk at the beginning of the film, as the boy hides in the clock. The noise is extremely important, but in some ways it seems like a silent movie.

The name of my other film is The Lover of Silent Movies. I love silent movies. My grandfather made silent movies, and my father made sound movies. They both were kind of famous. My grandfather was Leopoldo Torre Rios; my father was Leopoldo Torre Nilsson. And I'm Pablo Torre solo.

FilmFestivals.com reporter
Ray Privett