DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

For many years, I have been drawn to the piers along the Southern Californian coast.  I have fond memories of walking along them with my grandparents, and sad ones of when I would journey there to seek calmness within the waves.  One has the sense that there is an entire life beneath the pier: that it holds countless stories in its rigidity above the ever-changing tide.  It was on one of my many “people watching” trips that I began to consider setting a film there.  The many immigrants I met along the pier fascinated me: the rituals of fishing and of their interactions, and the cultural divide between the first and second generation.

Though the main character in EL PEZ is specific, his story is universal.  All of us have longed to understand our parents and the often-misunderstood manifestation of their love for us.  And everyone has gained new understanding of their past by revisiting it with the wisdom of maturity.  It was these themes that drew me to the story.  I was specifically interested, however, in the role that photography (and film) have in our ability to reconsider our own lives.  Film has an ability to not only capture our memories, but to in a sense rewrite it.  Indeed, it may be that the very act of filming or photographing an experience inherently transforms it.  Thus the decision to make the main character a photographer is no accident, and the mystery of how he engages with his subjects is central to the film’s story.