Bettina Perut is a Chilean filmmaker born in Italy. She launched her career as an assistant director on documentary television shows. Her feature co-directing and co-producing credits include “Martín Vargas from Chile,” “A Man Inside,” and “Welcome to New York.”
“Los Reyes” will screen at the 2019 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival on April 5. The film is co-directed by Iván Osnovikoff.
W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.
BP: “Los Reyes” is a film about a couple of dogs that live in a skatepark and have a passion: playing with a tennis ball. They are an existential pair. They have theur own language and their own codes, but at the same time they are immersed in other worlds, like that of the skaters that inhabit that park. There is, of course, a complex interdependence and communication between dogs, adolescents, and the things that populate that world. It is that complexity that interests us.
For me, as a human animal with emotionality and rationality, I would like to think that this is a film about companionship, friendship, and the love between Football and Chola.
More precisely, this film seeks to go beyond the humanization of other modes of existence — to give the dogs a space in the world under their own logic and their own values.
W&H: What drew you to this story?
BP: In 2009, I gave my co-director Iván a skateboard as a birthday present. He had not skated for 25 years and dreamed of doing it again. With his new board, he started going to the Los Reyes skatepark every week, and at the beginning of 2013, the idea of making a film in Los Reyes about skaters appeared. I never was very enthusiastic about working with human beings in a traditional way, and I was dissatisfied with the visual style of the first shooting. I thought that the form was conventional, that it was not coherent with our artistic identity, and that we were falling squarely into reality television.
Football and Chola appeared right at the worst of the crisis. One day Ivan was skating in Los Reyes, and I called him on the phone to tell that the film had failed, that it had to be aborted. He tried to convince me that there was no alternative, that we had to continue.
Then he tells me that, right at that moment, there were a couple of dogs playing in the bowls with a ball and that I had to see it. The very next day, I went to see the dogs and was captivated. “This film has to be about these two dogs,” I said. The dogs were the object of audiovisual experimentation that we were looking for.
W&H: What do you want people to think about when they are leaving the theater?
BP: I want people to end up loving Football and Chola as we love them. That they can spend 78 minutes in front of a screen rejoicing with an exciting canine language and behavior, to be able to interpret it freely.
I want them to see how other types of languages and behaviors are possible and enriching, not just those of humans. The human animal is a small portion of what makes up the world, and if we are not able to give space to the other modes of existence, we impoverish our vision of reality. I would like people to access to that truth through the film.
W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?
BP: The main challenge was the artistic approach. It seemed to me that focusing only on skaters would be a very conventional film, which did not have our artistic stamp and and was uninteresting. An anthropocentric idea of the world predominated, and we had left that aside in our last films. Why should the human being and his verbal language have to always be central?
Reality is a complex network of beings where the human is important, but where other modes of existence also circulate without which we could not be. That’s why the appearance of Football and Chola was fantastic and allowed us to give this new approach to the film. This new point of view allowed us to develop our true artistic identity.
W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.
BP: We usually fund our films based on public and international funding sources—mainly Chilean, but also European and North American. In this case, we got development funding from the Chilean government’s Production Development Corporation and production funding from Chile’s Ministry of Cultures, the IDFA Bertha Fund Europe, and the Tribeca Film Institute. The distribution funding also comes from Chile’s Production Development Corporation, Ministry of Cultures, and Banco Estado.
Ivan and I have been working together since 1997, and we have our own production company, Perut + Osnovikoff, through which we also made contributions like cameras, sound equipment, and an office.
W&H: What inspired you to become a filmmaker?
BP: As a child, I was rather lonely, but I had an inner world with a lot of imagination, ideas, and dreams. When I think of that girl, who obviously still persists in me, I feel great pride and admiration, and I’m excited to say it. One of my main interests was to look at and observe the world around me. I liked the visuality more than anything—how the world circulated around me and the relationships that occurred at every moment between beings.
My father always carried a camera with him and took many pictures every day, even though he was not a photographer. One day, I asked him to teach me, and I took some simple pictures of flowers. From then on, my love for the image did not let go. In my 20s, I crossed paths with friends who took very good pictures and I learned a lot from them, like how to make a good frame and to compose objects inside the framing.
Being a lover of the image, I started my career working at a television channel that made micro documentaries. I worked on a team of three people: the director, the producer, and me. There, I learned to edit, make sound, and to direct. I ended up directing even the director himself, who was the one who made the camera.
One day, and I will always remember this, while giving him instructions on what to record, he approached me very angrily and told me, “You are like a flea in my ears.” I liked that, and I really understood that I had all the skills to be a good director. Now, with the passing of the years, I am more convinced of the same thing: that the only thing I know how to do fairly well is to direct.
W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?
BP: The best recommendation I have received not only for my career but for my life is, “You must be prepared.” The truth is that if you are prepared you can be very lucky and, if you are not, things can turn out very badly.
It was my mom who always told me, “You must be prepared. Luck does not exist.” Obviously, there are things that are random and if you are prepared, you can take that chance. If not, you can see how life goes while the random passes in front of you daily, and you cannot catch it because you do not have the tools.
The worst advice: “Sometimes you cannot do something because things are difficult.” No—everything can be achieved. One must have guts, follow to the end, and bleed for what you want. If you cannot get it, then you have to create it.
W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?
BP: I would advise all female directors to push, claw, and persist until the forces are exhausted in the objectives set. Persevere to the end. Take each job as a unique challenge for experimentation. Do not repeat. Do not look for formulas and try to apply them in each film. Each film has its own language, a special way of being told.
Nothing is impossible. You have to pursue your goals until the end. Do not say “I cannot go forward.” Problems will always arise at the time of filming, or in any of the stages of filmmaking process, from development to distribution. But often problems and accidents are unique opportunities to achieve better things.
Be attentive to chance. Life is wonderfully hazardous and there are unique moments that will never happen again. For example, in the process of shooting, the team must be prepared to pick up that chance in an optimal way. You must have the speed and intuition to position the camera in the best possible way, look for those unique frames that speak of that fact in a unique way.
W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.
BP: I love Véréna Paravel, director of “Leviathan” and “Caniba.” Those are films that had a unique formal approach through which she allows us to perceive reality in unprecedented and revealing ways.
W&H: It’s been a little over a year since the reckoning in Hollywood and the global film industry began. What differences have you noticed since the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements launched?
BP: In a global scale those were key movements that helped to stop discrimination and shed a light on unacceptable practices. I have the privilege to work in Chile, where women have a leading position in the nonfiction film production scene. So in our particular case, those movements helped us to make stronger something that we already were establishing during the last 20 years. In that sense, I am very proud to be a Chilean women filmmaker.
