“When my little brother was two years old, he showed stark changes in his personality. Bit by bit he turned more distant, more silent. Until one day he stopped looking us in the eyes and he lost contact with reality.
A School in Cerro Hueso is a movie inspired by his story, my family’s story. And surely also the story of a lot of other families that are excluded from a system that still keeps on being intolerant and destructive regarding what is different.
Our protagonists are people who are fighting to survive in a world that advances into an ever-alien dimension. Characters with strong convictions that because of a particular situation, are obliged to abandon their upper-class lifestyle, moving to the suburbs and entering into contact with an unknown universe.
Against this background, the precarious school of Cerro Hueso, lost at the shore of the Paraná River, seems like a real shelter. The place where Ema for the first time finds a sense of belonging. This place where the differences don’t seem to exist.
Some of the conflicts that I was interested in dealing with are about the confrontation that appears between the idea of society and the “lying in wait” of the primitive, the intercultural relationships or those across classes, and the discovery of an underlying order under the appearances.
Besides, I believe that narration should have the goal of depicting (leaving an imprint) an experience. I wanted to make a fiction movie, but filmed “from the inside.” I was especially interested in taking the time to get to know and accompany the characters, discovering their personal universe slowly, layer by layer.
A School in Cerro Hueso is the portrait and the exploration of a close and tangible, but also emotional universe. It is the story of some lives that change from one moment to the other. Leaving in evidence the fragility of this imaginary world that we build ourselves every day. It is also about our capacities of adaptation to the unknown, and about our fears. About how we can grow even in the most adverse situations.
A School in Cerro Hueso talks about the different, the ungraspable within human relationships, the mystery of communication, but above all, about how in the end, we are all alike.
A couple of years ago, my brother finally started primary school. A teacher approached my father and told him: “We will have to learn to be like the Casuarina tree that grows at the rivers’ shores, holding on to the ground with our roots to endure the flooding.”
I am still thinking of this image, the one of firmly holding onto each other, embracing us, even though the water undermines the ground. To keep on going. Together.
Maybe the strongest motivation for this project (and maybe also the greatest challenge) was nothing else than to find “this image” that brings us closer together, that converts the alien into mutual.”
– Betania Cappato, Director
