SYNOPSIS

A young film director returns to Venezuela, inspired to make a film based on his father's life in the Amazon jungle. He casts Father to play himself. What starts as an act of love and ambition spirals into a process which confronts Father’s struggles with addiction and his life devoid of his son. El Father Plays Himself holds a steady lens to the ways the act of cinema unearths, binds, heals and destroys.

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ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

Mo Scarpelli is an Italian American director and cinematographer of non-fiction cinema. Her work seeks to capture the innate poetry of human life, allowing observation to poke holes in prevailing myths of the world and air the complexities of human identity.

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Scarpelli is a Berlinale Talent, a two-time recipient of Catapult Film Fund support, and has received fellowships from the New America Foundation and the International Women in Media Foundation. She has been awarded Best Director at MountainFilm Telluride, the Speranza Foundation Female Filmmaker Award, the Lena Sharpe Award for Persistence of Vision and the Reel Women Direct Prize (Cleveland Intl Film Festival).

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Her cinematography, photography and writing have been published with The New Yorker, The New York Times, the BBC, CNN’s Great Big Story, The Wall Street Journal, and Africa Review.

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MORE INFORMATION

Year: 2020

Language: Spanish

Subtitles: English

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