WHAT IS SPECTACULAR IS LIFE: A RETROSPECTIVE OF ALDO GARAY

From July 16 to 30, we invite you to visit a central part of Aldo Garay’s work that will also be the starting point to delve into his creative experience

Aldo Garay is one of the most prolific documentary filmmakers in Uruguay. From his first work in 1995, “Yo la más tremendo”, to his most recent work, “Guitarra blanca”, which we will have the opportunity to see at the opening of Documentary Week (and also at an industry screening on the platform online) Garay has released a dozen films.

With a self-taught education and a trade trained daily through his work as a director at TV Ciudad, it can be said that Garay is also one of the freest filmmakers in Uruguay. His filmography invites a journey through the marginal through extraordinary lives, a journey that is proposed from dignity, free of exoticism or spectacularization. In all of his films, the bonds of trust that were forged are glimpsed, from where he builds his characters and the universes they inhabit.

They are protagonists who live and dream, who are conditioned by contexts, both gender, race and sexual orientation and class, especially class. We find it in the films that bring together the transvestite and trans universes of poor Montevideo; and in the rural and isolated community of Quebracho that sustains life in “Close to the clouds”; but also in “El filmador”: where he allows us to enter, with the same dignity and without prejudice, in that inaccessible elitist world that also dreams, is frustrated, and fails; and he gives us a piece of memory until now marginal.

We find in Garay’s filmography a cut, we could say historical, of the trans and transvestite world. From his founding work in the 90s, the 2000s and 2010s in “The Marriage” and “The New Man”; and also today, in his work in the final stage “Carmín”, starring the trans artist Sofía Saunier. But the approaches are not for the trans but from the trans. And it is precisely that conscious conflict around identity, self-representation and resistance to the given, which appears as latent throughout his filmography. From the transvestite and trans protagonists that he has filmed so much, to the José Pedro Díaz that is sought after in Europe and that appears in “The Filmer”; in those who are built from the admiration of a legend in “Un tal Eduardo” and “Guitarra blanca”, or in the Henry Engler of “The Circle”.

We invite you to go through part of Garay’s work in this retrospective that will be available between July 16 and 30 and will be the starting point for Aldo Garay in his talk at the Documentary Seminar.

The Filmer

2021, 70 min

Hidden cinematographic notes since 1950 and a literary diary discovered in 2010 that narrate episodes in common, both made by the same person, the Uruguayan writer José Pedro Díaz. In the present, in a documentary key, this rescue will be told where art, memory and existence merge into the same story.

The New Man

2015, 79 min

Stephania is a transvestite born in Nicaragua. As a child, she was adopted by a couple of Uruguayan leftist militants in the midst of the Sandinista revolution. At present he earns a living taking care of cars in Montevideo. The film accompanies Stephania’s reunion with her native country, where she was once a son, a brother and a literacy boy, and where today she wants to be accepted as the woman she is.

The Marriage

2011, 71 min

“The Marriage” tells the story of love and companionship between Julia Brian and Ignacio González, a former construction worker. Julia and Ignacio met one afternoon on Christmas Eve 21 years ago in a square. They were both alone and so they decided to spend the holidays together. Since then they have been inseparable. Julia is 67 years old. Until adolescence she was called Oscar Alberto. Ignatius is 77 years old. This is the story of “El casamiento”, a simple and tender story of ordinary people who were lucky enough to meet in a square…

The Circle

2008, 92 min

Tupamaro leader and hostage of the Uruguayan military dictatorship for thirteen years. The prisoner whom prolonged torture and isolation drove him insane. Swedish citizen and physician internationally recognized for his research on Alzheimer’s disease. All those lives fit into the life of Dr. Henry Engler.

Script and direction: José Pedro Charlo and Aldo Garay | Production: José Pedro Charlo, Yvonne Ruocco, Detlef Ziegert, Gonzalo Rodríguez Bubis, Pablo Salomón, Sergio Gándara | Editing: Federico La Rosa | Direction of Photography: Diego Varela | Sound: Álvaro Mechoso | Original Music and Sound Post-production: Daniel Yafalián | Production house: Memory and Society, SUR Films | Co-production houses: Guazú Media, Morocha Films, Parox.

Near the Clouds

2005, 73 min

In a rural town, in the middle of the Uruguayan countryside, live a few elderly people. Immersed in a huge green desert, the community lacks electricity and running water. However, its inhabitants watch time pass slowly and silently without complaints or excuses, waiting for a new day. Such is life, at least in Quebracho.

Script and direction: Aldo Garay | Photography: Diego Varela | Sound: Ismael González | Editing: Federico La Rosa

Yo, la más tremendo

1995, 43 min

At the beginning of the nineties, a trans community lives in the neighborhood of Palermo in Montevideo. I, the most tremendous alternates the individual portrait and the choir of their lives. A frontal look to let be and let them develop until they unfold their own ideas of the world. Pioneering work on the subject in Uruguay.

Script, direction, sound and photography: Aldo Garay | Editing: Leo Sala

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