Interview with Ezequiel Salinas and Ramiro Sonzini, co-directors of Mi Última Aventura (My Last Adventure)

A poor young man decides to cease to be so, and along with his friend, he tries to flee with a bag full of money from his boss. The last night in his hometown is the two friend’s review, in the form of a farewell, of the places, the emotion and the songs that marked their lives.

What was the starting point of the film?

The starting point was partly a preliminary work by Ezequiel Salinas, Adieu à la nuit, where a mysterious character rides his moped through the night. In this short film, there was a very special way of filming at night in the city of Córdoba (Argentina): The coloured light, the rain, and the movement of the moped produced a kind of trance, a moving sensation full of nostalgia, which we found very attractive. The other starting point was the stories we heard at various family reunions or with friends, with inhabitants of the town, which secretly account for a very special, contradictory and charming identity.

Mi Última Aventura deals with friendship, betrayal, and with the end of an era as well. Do these topics interest you specifically?

Friendship is a kind of bond that can take many different shapes. We wanted to develop a very intense bond, something similar to family bonds and also something along the lines of a romantic relationship. Often, friends are the family we make for ourselves as we gradually move through life, a family that forms according to the path we follow. And these bonds also include the possibility of neglect, misunderstanding or betrayal. What are the circumstances in which a betrayal can happen and how do we deal with it, how does it impact our bond and is it possible to maintain the bond after such an event, this was something we found fascinating to stage on screen.

I presume the work on the soundtrack was particularly important for this film. How do you hope it will resonate with the audience?

Yes, that would be fantastic. Not only because it was through the narration and the music that we tried to produce a specific atmosphere, an emotion that runs through our characters (the feeling of saying goodbye to a place that we loved and despised at the same time), but also because the lyrics of each song were meant to produce a resonance, an echo in the story that the characters were experiencing.

What were the biggest advantages of working on the film together, and the challenges that you faced?

We believe that the biggest advantage is that for every decision we make there are always at least two points of view. Maybe the work process is slower this way, but we always have the opportunity to discuss and reconsider the decisions we make. I think the main challenge is to always find interesting scenes to shoot with the limited means we have at our disposal.

Is there a particular short film that has made a strong impression on you?

Despite the fact that there are lots of short films that we find interesting, to make Mi última aventura we were influenced more by feature length films: Millenium Mambo and Goodbye South Goodbye by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Collateral by Michael Mann and I vitelloni by Federico Fellini.

What’s your definition of a good film?

We believe that it is impossible to define what makes a good film, but we also believe that the raison d’être of cinema is to help us understand human life. Without people, cinema makes no sense.