About El Father Plays Himself: This behind-the-scenes documentary of the making-of-a-fiction film takes a closer, harder look at the filmmaking process than most. The fiction film in question, Jorge Thielen Armand’s La Fortaleza (which premiered at Rotterdam in 2020), is a collaboration of the trendy, hybrid sort with his non-professional actor father, with whom he hasn’t had a relationship since his teenage years. The script is based on the titular El Father’s days of adventures in ‘90s Venezuela, coupled with a hard look at the effects alcoholism has on a father-son relationship and workplace environment. El Father Plays Himself’s power comes from director-cinematographer Mo Scarpelli’s steady, probing camera and understanding that nobody is powerless in this situation—consent is constantly being shifted and negotiated.
Six years after Frame by Frame (co-directed with Alexandria Bombach, DocYard Fall ’15) Scarpelli returns to the DocYard with her second solo-directed film, which continues her investigation into how cameras mediate human experiences of reality. As the collaborative and co-created film practices gain currency on the festival circuit and in academic scholarship for its aesthetics and ethics, El Father Plays Himself radically questions the reconciliatory capacity of filmmaking. (AS)
