Fuego en el mar

Direction: Sebastián Zanzottera
Production: Nacho Losada
Editing: Tatiana Mazú
Sound design: Julián Galay
Graphic design: Joaquín Maito and Tatiana Mazú
Color grading: Daniela Medina Silva and Joaquín Maito
Sound post-production: Hernán Higa
Translations: Manuel Embalse
Produced by the collective Antes Muerto Cine
Genre: Documentary/Animation/Experimental

Some images of the sea on fire trigger a 3D dream with photographs of my father in an oil plant in Patagonia. There, a journey unfolds around absences, marks on the body, and the construction of masculinity among oil and gas workers.

Director’s Notes

“Fuego en el mar” began as notes about questioning what constitutes masculinities, during a time of strong feminist momentum in the region in recent years, which redefined the ways we think about ourselves and interpret our past.

I tried to explore this question while finding and reviewing my father’s archives, who passed away a few years ago, from the time when he worked at the state gas company before its privatization and shutdown.

I began the project in 3D as an interactive experience. I developed it in my spare time after editing, in an experimental and impulsive way. I wanted to explore the limits of what a 3D engine allowed, and to open up unexplored areas in several senses. I tried to recover a space I only knew through photos, and gradually transform it, asking myself about the psychoacoustics of these workplaces, how to politicize an absence and a pain.

My father’s relationship with his job was something I struggled with as a child, and only after his death could I begin to understand it as part of a larger problem. A problem in which class identity was also involved in the worker’s construction, built as a productive hero willing to give his life for extraction. These were the foundations upon which the state energy companies were built, consolidating an ideology and practices rooted in oil nationalism, in a country where land extractivism sustains its main economic activities. With the privatization of these companies, this changed, generating even greater precariousness among workers, idealized as heroes but exploited in practice, unable to economically support a family amid an economic crisis. I believe this deeply affected my father, and I cannot avoid seeing in his work many of the causes that led to his death at 56 from a heart attack: the hearing damage caused by his work, the exhausting pace, the moral blow of being laid off and the economic instability, the psychological consequences he endured. I think all of this guided me to search for an immersive and experiential way to tell this story. To play with associations, with the possibility of reworking the material reality presented to us as given and reimagining it for the future.

Notes

Cracks in memory
By Alex Vázquez in La pistola de Chéjov
https://www.lapistoladechejov.com/2022/08/02/fuego-en-el-mar-2022/

The Search for Another Geometric Form: A Conversation with Delfina Carlota Vázquez and Sebastián Zanzottera
By Tomás Guarnaccia
http://www.conlosojosabiertos.com/la-busqueda-de-otra-forma-geometrica-una-charla-con-delfina-carlota-vazquez-y-sebastian-zanzottera/

Screenings

The film premiered at the Nyon Film Festival Visions du Réel 2022.
In Argentina, it was awarded Best Short Film in the International Competition at the Cosquín International Independent Film Festival as well as the Cine.ar Award.
It has screened at international festivals including Vienna Shorts, Atemporal (Honorable Mention), DOC Bahía Blanca (Best Argentine Short Film), KinoForum – São Paulo International Short Film Festival, MUTA – International Festival of Audiovisual Appropriation, and Camden IFF.