The Filmer
(El filmador)
Aldo Garay / Uruguay / 2015 / 70 min
BAFICI Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival
Best Avant Garde & Genre FilmLima Alterna
Special Mention
Pricing
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Spanish with English subtitles
With José Pedro Díaz, Amanda Berenguer
The Filmer uncovers a hidden facet of celebrated Uruguayan writer José Pedro Díaz: his secret passion for cinema. Between 1950 and 1952, Díaz created a silent yet deeply expressive film diary, never shown publicly in his lifetime. Shot with two cameras—an Emel 8mm and a Bolex 16mm—the thirteen surviving reels of black-and-white film offer a rare, multifaceted archive of mid-century life and thought.
These films capture a remarkable range of themes: the everyday rhythms of working-class Montevideo, intimate portraits of intellectual and artistic circles in postwar Europe, and domestic travel scenes featuring his wife, the poet Amanda Berenguer. Díaz’s lens transforms ordinary moments into meditative visual essays, imbuing the personal with profound historical and emotional resonance.
Complementing this cinematic archive is Díaz’s extensive literary journal. When placed in dialogue, the film reels and written diary form a singular, interdisciplinary chronicle—one in which literature and image converge to reveal the inner life and cultural context of one of Uruguay’s most significant intellectuals.
Aldo Garay’s documentary not only rescues these materials from obscurity but also reflects on the act of creation itself. The Filmer becomes a film about filmmaking, a diary about a diary—excavating memory, authorship, and legacy. This work invites reflection on the intersections of literature, visual culture, and national memory in Latin America.
Related Subjects
About the Director
Aldo Garay (Montevideo, 1969), Uruguayan film and television director. He has directed several documentary feature films and one fiction piece. He has received plenty international distinctions among which we can highlight the Teddy Award for The New Man.
Press
“The life of Uruguayan writer José Pedro Díaz is recovered in this investigative documentary that relies, in addition to his story and biography, on the films that Díaz himself made during a long trip he made through Europe with his wife, a poet.” – Diego Lerer, Micropsia
Notes on the Film
“Those of us who make documentaries, given the nature of our work, learn to negotiate with chance. We win and lose, capture and miss unique moments and situations—unimaginable and unrepeatable. From the very beginning of this project, I have felt that I might have begun to defeat chance. It is truly exceptional to find a film archive so unique and valuable.
At the same time, it is strange to approach the manipulation of images and texts created by someone else. This creates an additional responsibility, beyond that of creating a documentary story, which in this case consists of finding the exact filmic pace and drive of the original filmmaker. What decisions would José Pedro have made in the editing of his film? Would he have accompanied the images with text from the literary journal? What music would he have chosen to create the different atmospheres?
This film will be neither an inventory of old images nor an excuse to show certain formal rejoicings. Above all, it is a film that has something to say about creation, artistic legacy, and various aspects of how Uruguayan art culture—past and present—is positioned and considered. I will try to be more than a mere rescuer of fragments of time and life perpetuated in 16 mm. What motivates me is bringing order (or disorder) to a story composed of real elements of the past and present—one containing amazement, emotion, intrigue, information. Ultimately, my motivation is to make a documentary film that provides elements of knowledge and discussion about a creator, José Pedro Díaz, his colleagues, and their time.
I am interested in reprocessing traces that are heading towards oblivion and in creating a new form of articulation—a bridge, a grammar between images and texts in privacy, without destination or recipient, in his journals.”
– Aldo Garay, Director