Courage

A story of self-discovery, where the main characters play versions of themselves and unfold on the stage of life. An aging 76-year-old actress, her vision clouded by a retina disease, fights to maintain her place in the theater company she has called home for so long. As she struggles to come to terms with her impending blindness, her life is further complicated by the unexpected arrival of her estranged 50-year-old son, fresh from his own battle with alcoholism. As the two try to reconcile their past and present, the actress is forced to confront her fears and insecurities. Together, they embark on a journey of healing and redemption as they navigate the complexities of family, aging, and the search for acceptance.

I love a film that comes from the core, stories that show the complexity and fragility of the human condition when it has to face itself. Topics that change the viewer's perception about even the smallest conflict. I like these stories because I usually find a reflection of my own, sometimes dark existence. That is what I wanted to achieve with Courage: a project that, while being personal, would also be honest; a film uses simplicity to get closer to its audience. That would talk about us, our doubts and daily anguishes, our uncertainties, and fears, our defects and weaknesses, the part we try to disguise, sometimes with a smile, but what lies within our nature. Although Courage is an extended feature fiction film, we made a cathartic family film project: the main characters were based on my mother and my brother, and also they played themselves. Despite being fiction, the script is inspired by these real people, with their own profound truths, in those moments that happened in the past but whose effects are still running through their veins. Now the crisis has passed, they are rediscovering each other and mainly due to the timing of the shooting of the movie: Close enough to reality to generate a certain documentary dramatic tension and far enough away to be able to reinterpret it in an Aristotelian structure.