Clara Cullen. For those not of the cinephile tribe, his name might not ring a bell. You are the director of Manuelathe Argentinian film that -a few days ago- just won the award for Best Latin Film at the Santa Bárbara Film Festival, an annual event in the always sunny Californian city.
A good excuse, therefore, to delve into the story of this young director who in her curriculum already includes meetings, training experiences and collaborations with Names big Like those of Spike Lee, Werner Herzog and Quentin Tarantino, to name three of those that make the reporter ask, how are you doing? How am I? anecdotes, Please!
He’ll talk about it later, Clara. Now what matters is how it came about Manuelathe seed before it sprouts…
“The first image I had of the film was in the middle of the night, in dreams: I saw a person accompanying Alma, my daughter, across the border with Mexico on foot,” he says clarion from California, a few hours before leaving for Paris, in full Fashion Week– where he will shoot a documentary about an important person (“I can’t tell you more”) from the fashion world.
“I had that image and said: I would like to re-meaning it,” she continues. You see a Latina woman with a blonde girlfriend and you automatically think: it was stolen. And no, I meant: he’s saving her. The idea was this: to give a new meaning to prejudice”.
“There I called Barbara Lombardo – who lived between Los Angeles and Buenos Aires at the time – and I said ‘hey, do you dare to make this film? We have to do it next month and I would like to shoot it with my daughter, Alma…
“I have this house – the owners leave – and then she starts school, okay?” And he said to me: “King, come on, let’s do it”. So basically the germ of the film was this: a location, an actress and my daughter.”
They didn’t just do it. They did it so well that the Santa Barbara judging panel awarded it.
Manuela in Mar del Plata
Cullen’s first feature premiered towards the end of the year in the Argentine Panorama section of the Mar del Plata Film Festival. With Barbara Lombardo like Manuela e Alma Faragó (daughter of Clara in life as daughter of Manuela in fiction). “One of the things I like most about the film is seeing my daughter Alma, and seeing her so small; having it, really, is a treasure for me.”
The synopsis summarizes the film as “the story of a Latina immigrant in the United States who finds work as a babysitter for a mother who is often away on business. Taking care of the house of the little girl, little Alma, Manuela gradually builds an emotional bond with she, who seems to replace what she can’t have with her own daughter…
A story of uprooting which, with sensitivity but without moralism, deals with the pain of destroyed families, forever broken for inhabiting a brutally unequal world“.
Sums up the mother of creatures: “It’s a movie that we filmed very freely, like a jazz band, improvising and adjusting everything based on what Alma was comfortable with. And now that it’s finished, I like that it’s not my film anymore and belongs to the audience.”
Herzog, and how to open the doors of others
When preparing for the interview, a search for the site lets us know that Clara was born in Buenos Aires and that she studied cinema at the Universidad del Cine and documentary at Parsons University in New York. He began his career working with Spike Lee and under the tutelage of Werner Herzog. His documentary medium-length lost and found It has been screened at various festivals.
-Let’s start with Herzog then…
-Studying with him was the best thing that happened to me in my life.
He says (phrase that requires a title), and his devotion to the German teacher is as clear as his name when he slips that over the weekend “I just saw another fitzcarraldo AND rage the wrath of God“, without clarifying (damn!) how many I’ve seen them before. But she recalls his bizarre teaching of him as soon as she met him:
-I’ll never forget it again: the first day she taught me to tie my strands with a hair clip. Moral? No door can interrupt the vision of your project.
Spike Lee, Manu Ginobili fan
-Spike Lee, develop…
-I worked with him on the set of Inside the man (The perfect plan, with this casting, write: Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer and Willem Dafoe, Jodie Foster and Clive Owen). We were with Ariel Winograd, we were assistants in the video department, we had to connect monitors to cameras and be aware of those details.
Spike estranged me twice and Wino who was trying to make her first feature film raised money by wearing a shirt that said she needed money for the film! I remember that too Spike was a big fan of Manu Ginobili. Every time he passed me, he imitated passing the ball through the air!
Interview with Tarantino
Let’s be clear: Clara doesn’t have it interviewed with Quentin, aspiring to integrate his staff. It so happened that it was Clara who interviewed Taranto. A commission from The New York Times style (the world’s leading newspaper men’s fashion magazine), note in which the author of pulp Fiction connect your ideal gelato to your work:
Source: Clarin
