Cuero duro

Partager :

Note of intent

This film is about Joe, not about his life. I’m looking for the secret of the contradictory creation between music, places, daydream, drugs & night. A contradiction in which Joe plunges deep reaching his intimacy. This film is not chronological; it jumps in the different periods of Joe’s life, a touring musician who finds uprooting in hotel rooms; impersonal, standard and lazy. From these rooms we immerse ourselves in his delirium, in his self sabotage, in his creative process, allowing us to feel the rest of his life through the out of field.

Synopsis

El Joe, a genius, singer and composer, who with his tropical music and singular voice brought together overflowing crowds. In a hotel room in New York begins the journey of an artist who finds alienation in his multiple tours. Joe runs away with the love of his life: the crack pipe; the permanent and the established; that and his music, the sounds and Umo, his manager, his servant, his friend. Another slamming door, Joe sick and tired, locks himself in a fleabag hotel, set up to record the album of his life. He and his musicians would go together on a psychedelic trip. Joe closes the curtains of the hotel room in Bogotá. There is women stuff all over the place. Searching, jealous and paranoid; he is convinced that Mary, his Muse of inspiration, is being unfaithful. Cuero Duro finds the man who sabotaged every single thing he loved, to lock himself back in a random room, in a random city.

Visual concept

The music is Joe’s, but as a work in progress: “The Centurion of the night” song whispered in to the mirror; “Mary” said as a dialogue by phone; “Tania” heard as an inner voice in front of the coffin. It’s the whistles, basses and drums that added to his heartbeat accompany him through the corridors of the hotel taking us to the confinement. More than an image it’s rhythm and structure. I seek the gloom, dark hotel rooms barely illuminated, black and shinny skins as polished bronzes. And the camera is a delicate, patient and silent observer.