One day, in the relentless winter in Opava, the story of The Play was born by chance. A director in a small theater—much like a film director in a small country like Chile—decides to stage an impossible play again, much like the film director trying to make a movie in a foreign country in a totally different language. The movie then becomes a mirror in which it looks not only at the personal tribulations of the main character, in which it examines crises and doubts valid for many men but also a way to explore the insecurities and doubts, the stubbornness and selfishness involved in the creative process.

It took me four films in my own language and a return to my country to finally start to talk more openly about more personal issues, ideas, fears, and feelings. Issues are not only mine but belong to a new generation of men my age. Curiously—or maybe not so curiously—it will happen in a movie in a foreign country, in a foreign language, and in black and white. A movie that looks like a film of the past, talking about today’s issues in a faraway and cold place, describing things that are still too personal and too dear for me to be seen up close. A necessary distance, maybe. Movies and stories have always found me in the most unexpected ways. This one is not an exception. Alejandro Fernández ALMENDRAS

By the Fire (2011), To Kill a Man (2014), Much Ado About Nothing (2016)

Across the Frame of Mythology, Theater, and Film
The Play, directed by Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Fernández Almendras, is an updated version of Unamuno’s Phaedra, which, in turn, is a reinterpretation of the Greek tragedy by Euripides, later turned into a myth. Throughout the film, the myth, its stage adaptation, and its literary version fold one into another like Chinese boxes. One man and two women are involved in a difficult love story closely connected to the play.

In a small Czech town, a theater director is planning to stage Phaedra, and in the process, his personal and professional life seems to collapse. Gradually, a tense atmosphere grows; the playwright’s endless hesitations, some episodes of domestic abuse, and his wife and lover’s emotional instability finally result in an inevitable crumbling of his world.

Almendras’ first feature film in the Czech Republic, The Play, composes a furious black and white scenery, where the night and the many choreographic walkings around the town become the main characters. Towards the end, this dark, puzzling movie turns out to be luminous, just when the protagonist manages to face his personal conflicts. Marcela GAMBERINI 

Production Arizona Films, Film&Roll (production@filmandroll.com), Jirafa (contacto@jirafa.cl)
Distribution Jirafa (contacto@jirafa.cl), Pilot Film