“I’m not a mountain climber, but I like long hikes, and when legendary mountain climber Iván Vallejo invited me to join him on a trek to Nepal, I didn’t hesitate to say yes. I’m not a documentarian either, but I like telling stories, and the documentary form has been calling me for a while now.
Behind the Mist is perhaps the most organic film I’ve worked on throughout my career. The documentary wasn’t planned beforehand, and I didn’t know what would happen, so I let myself be taken over by the project.
When Iván invited me to the project, I knew I was going to experience something unique. I was at a moment of crisis in my career, accompanied by some internal turmoil: my last movie had not worked as well as I had expected, and I was seriously questioning myself and my creative process. Usually, I like to plan a lot when I make films—I’ve made fiction features for many years now, always using elaborate screenplays—so it was a challenge to let go of that structure.
That said, I think I’ve been unconsciously avoiding telling personal stories, although I’ve always thought that what I really want to do is explore a more intimate and confessional type of cinema. Without forcing things, this documentary allowed me to explore both paths.
Oddly enough, when I began this adventure, I didn’t like the idea that the film would have the ‘agenda’ of reaching and ‘inspiring’ people. Fortunately, I realized early on that the film didn’t have to be a conventional portrait of a well-known and respected personality. I had a list of 17 topics and questions I wanted to ask Iván, but during a lunch stop in a remote village, we had a conversation that was more interesting than any of our interviews, and I had the good instinct to take the camera out and record it.
From that moment on, I realized the film would not be a portrait, but a conversation instead, and the editing process became tremendously revealing for me. I realized that the more I drew into my own worries and anguish, the more parallels I could see between the mountain metaphor and life, which is what makes the film interesting.
The journey ended up being intense, and it made my cynicism vanish—amazingly enough, you can feel that in my footage. The structure of a journey surrounded by mist, with a climax where something exterior is revealed once an interior acceptance happens, is not something I could have manipulated or controlled—it just happened this way. But what I did control was using all the elements we encountered as part of the metaphor.
In the end, the film does have an ‘inspirational’ touch, but it doesn’t happen in the traditional approach of a ‘self-help’ book. Instead, it chooses to be honest and convey the daily doubts we all live with. I feel exposed when presenting this film, but that is exactly the type of cinema I’m interested in making now.”
— Sebastián Cordero, Director
