Movie guerrillas in our midst

There was once a lonely guy who organized his own birthday party to surprise himself. He hung a welcome banner and arranged some dolls on a chair in the entrance hall of his house. He bought himself a birthday gift — some leopard-print underpants — and receives it while looking to one side, as if someone else was responsible for the generous gesture...

This is the essence of the only written scene of El señor, a filmmaking experiment directed by Juan Cavestany and starring Luis Bermejo, a regular actor with the Animalario theater group. It’s a medium-length feature (42 minutes), made exclusively for the internet and distributed for three euros at www.dispongodebarcos.com.

Is the project an act of rebellion at a time when the industry isn’t giving work to its creators? “I consider myself neither an admirer nor a follower of weird or marginalized films,” explains Cavestany. “I love the films made within the industry, but this is the only way I found of doing what I wanted to do right now.”

Doing it in free moments and without financing is one thing, but how do you make the end product available? Give it away? Charge for it? Ask for contributions? In the end he decided to charge an accessible price in order to, among other reasons, give value to what people who devote themselves to cinema do and gauge the appetite for this kind of initiative. “If everything is free, you lose perspective.”

But who is this man who organizes his own birthday party? The need to follow this character, to investigate his life, emerged from the wish to explore him. Without a script or sets, director and actor took to the streets and over 10 days went around a Madrid neighborhood, entering bars, shops and different places without prior permission or the annoying and difficult structures of a conventional film shoot. “We’re living in a moment — not just in the cinema but also in many other industries — in which something is dying without us knowing what the future will be, what model will replace it. It is this intermediate state, like an evening performance, between illegal downloads on one side and financial stagnation of the film industry on the other, in which we either invent something or sit there with our arms crossed,” explains Cavestany, who has already tried his luck as a guerrilla auteur with his previous film, Dispongo de barcos.

Luis Bermejo, an actor linked to Madrid’s La Abadía theater and independent spaces such as La cuarta pared, had a difficult task before him. He got over the embarrassment of hurling himself on to the streets and basked in the glory of forgetting himself, “of being that cosmically desperate character.”

This is the only way I found of doing what I wanted to do right now”

“He’s a guy who wants to rebel against the loneliness that surrounds him, given that it’s such a depressing circumstance, and seeks a way to be happy, even in those difficult moments. He sorts through the obstacles and [...] that life puts in front of him,” he says. It’s a description you could apply just as well to the film itself.