El Father Plays Himself (2020)

Directed by: Mo Scarpelli | 105 minutes | documentary

When young Venezuelan director Jorge Thielen Armand decided to make a feature about a downtrodden man who wants to fight his demons in the Venezuelan jungle, and based that story loosely on his father’s life, he made a bold choice: he cast his own father Jorge Thielen Hedderich for the lead role of tomboy Roque. The end product was ‘La Fortaleza’, which was screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2020.

Parts of ‘La Fortaleza’ are therefore inspired by the past of father Jorge, now a (still remarkably young-looking) fifties, who has been struggling with an alcohol addiction for years. In the 1990s – son Jorge had emigrated to Canada with his mother in the meantime – he worked in more or less legal gold mines in the Venezuelan Amazon, where he had the greatest adventures. This remarkable combination – the life story of Jorge Sr. himself, the relationship with his son the filmmaker and this risky project – seized documentary maker Mo Scarpelli to follow the production with her own camera. That making-of became ‘El Father Plays Himself’, a wonderful look behind the scenes, often uncomfortable, often witty and sometimes moving.

The film also seems to be an attempt by Jorge junior, who only spent parts of his life near his father, to mend the broken relationship and get to know him better. This runs like a thread through the scenes, but it never becomes explicit. They don’t have real conversations, because most of the work has to be done during the day and father Jorge is no longer open to reason most evenings. We hear that son Jorge left Venezuela when he was fifteen, but we don’t get to know the how and why behind that move. Nor do we know exactly where Father Jorge lived all those years, how he himself looks back on his life or how the context of the deep crisis in Venezuela in recent years plays a role. In fact, the cast gathers in a beautiful apartment, where there is no sign of any crisis. It is a conscious choice of Scarpelli to leave these kinds of questions unanswered; she moves along with the recordings like a fly on the wall, but does not assign herself a role, does not ask direct questions, does not comment.

Nevertheless, the glimpse can certainly be called intimate at times. The slow scenes (after all, making a film also involves a lot of waiting, smoking, hanging out, sitting) is a clever representation of how the tension rises during a shooting day. Especially when father Jorge really empathizes with his role as Roque – usually he already has half a bottle of rum behind him when the filming starts. We see the crew watching Jorge’s play with bated breath, admiring and sometimes doubting: is he still acting here or is he going on forever in front of the camera?

The latter never seems far away in the brooding jungle: more than once Jorge has to be forcefully urged to rest; during filming, he hits the ground so hard that he breaks a finger. A small event like diluting a bottle of rum with some water – which Father Jorge immediately notices – can make him furious. This gives us an idea of ​​how impossible it must have been to live with him. That makes this project and Jorge junior’s attempts to understand and value his father all the more admirable. Still, a little more direction would have been nice for the viewer, who is now left with many questions.