A TRUE STORY
This is me with the screenplay.
It may look like just a stack of paper, but to me, it’s 3 years of ideas, notes, silence, doubt, rewriting, observing, remembering.
It’s the desert I crossed, both literal and emotional. It’s the people I met, the questions I asked, the beauty I insisted on finding when everything felt lost.
This isn’t just a story I wrote.
It’s one I lived, one that changed me, and one I hope will touch those who watch it with the same quiet intensity it carried when it first came to me.
And this… this is me saying it.
Letter One of "Letters to a Young Poet", by Rainer Maria Rilke. Written on February 17, 1903, from Paris.
“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away… and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast. Be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn’t necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.”
A LETTER FROM A STORYTELLER
At 46, I found myself in a moment strangely similar to the one I had at 42 when I first traveled to Chile and lived the story that later became LUZ.
When you have an artist’s soul and haven’t yet found your artistic purpose, you feel your body shaking from the inside.
It’s not a midlife crisis. It’s more like a creative haunting.
A quiet voice that won’t leave you alone, always asking:
“Are you really going to let this go?”
I’ve been professionally successful in areas that weren’t my true passion.
And I don’t say that with the illusion that doing what you love is always possible.
We all know that life isn’t a fairytale.
But there’s something about reaching this age and truly knowing what you were made for.
Believing in the gifts God gave you.
And then having the courage to give yourself an honest try.
I’d rather drive ten hours on a hunch that I might run into Walter Salles (which I did) than spend ten minutes writing emails that go nowhere.
I’d rather spend days walking around Los Angeles with no appointments and no guarantees, than keep dialing numbers that never lead to anything real.
For me, movement, even wild, uncertain, maybe even ridiculous movement... is better than sitting still, waiting for a reply that never comes.
What bothers me is not even trying.
It's the fear or the laziness of not giving it a shot.
So, I'm going to Santiago and Los Angeles.
Not because I’m lost.
But because I’ve never felt so certain.
I’m not looking for magic.
I’m looking for someone who sees in LUZ what I see.
I’m living through an epiphany.
And if you’re an artist, you know that you don’t ignore epiphanies.
They don’t happen very often.
ONE LAST THING...
Most people think they don’t like philosophy. Until they feel it.
Not the kind that wears a suit and quotes dead men in Latin. But the kind that slips in through a quiet moment, a long silence, a line of dialogue that hits too close to home.
Philosophy isn’t some abstract theory. It’s drama. It’s the weight in your chest when someone leaves, the need to be seen, the fear of being forgotten, the way a single question can unravel your certainty.
The right story doesn’t teach you philosophy.
It makes you live it.
Because deep down, everyone’s asking the same things:
What am I doing here?
Why does this hurt so much?
Where did the time go?
What if I never find what I’m looking for?
LUZ is about that. It doesn’t preach. It doesn’t explain.
It trusts the viewer to feel it.
Because when philosophy comes dressed as a desert, as a fading relationship, as the quiet love between two people no one noticed... that’s when it hits.
It invites you in to laugh, to observe, to relate. It doesn’t push. It doesn’t scream. It doesn’t try to prove anything.
It just wants to reach a place most films today don’t even try to touch.
That quiet space where emotion meets thought.
It’s a film for real people.
With characters that feel alive.
With situations that could happen to anyone, but seen through an artistic lens, full of honesty and poetry.
LUZ is the kind of film you watch with a smile… and somehow leave deep in thought.
Because sometimes, that’s exactly what we need:
a good, beautiful film, with subtle humor and a soul.
Not a film that wants to be “difficult.”
A film that wants to be true.