Vanina Spataro’s debut Naufragios reflects on unrequited love, loneliness and suffering in silence
The Argentinian producer Vanina Spataro has debuted as a director with her first feature film, Naufragios, a realist and costumbrista reflection – but one with touches of fantasy – on friendship, loneliness, unrequited love and suffering in silence.
That’s how Spataro defined the Uruguayan-Argentinean co-production that tells the story of several lonely souls who find themselves in a seaside resort out of season. During their stay, they encounter an unconscious sailor who seems to have come from the past to turn the characters’ lives upside down. This turning point proves to wake them up, make them open up, unite them, and prepare them to build something new.
The director has described the film as intimate, illuminating and contemplative, where the bonds between people transcend age and gender. Spataro believes that individual loneliness is also collective, especially through bonds and friendship.
As the film progresses, the script shifts to show friendship as a means to find, slowly but surely, a way out of your problems.
The actor Alfonso Tort – who stars in the film – pointed out that the four or five weeks they spent filming isolated on a paradisiacal beach in Uruguay turned them into a kind of travelling circus, moving to different places in order to create a story, he explained metaphorically. Tort mentioned he experienced a heightened sensitivity that throughout the filming because his father had passed away less than a week before. The actors Sofía Palomino, Romina Peluffo, Maiamar Abrodos, Lautaro Bettoni and Matero Chiarino join Tort in the cast.
The team’s weeks of isolation without contact with society generated a special artistic connection that’s reflected throughout the film. 'Isolation is a metaphor for what we are as people, it makes us believe in things that aren’t real, and it also makes us wake up', argued Spataro. For her, although the figure of the sailor may border on the absurd, he’s the driving force that mobilises the characters and encourages them to confess their hidden sufferings, which they insist on keeping quiet about.
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