A family with separated parents is like some kind of explosion where the elements included flight expelled from their core to the emptiness. The members expelled are then alone, without an affection axis to guide them and give them the necessary feeling that there is something that they belong to.
In this emotional state each member of the ex-family tries on his own resources to recover, but this time without support, thus creating an individual without apparent affective needs. A lonely being scared about the possibility of caring.
The father in our movie (Emilio) feels again this fall to the unknown after his painful separation. In this lack of something to guide him he decides to try to communicate seriously with her teenager daughter.
Antonia, away from that life, is trying to belong to her group of friends, which is the most important thing in the world for her, with her diary and her I-Pod. But her father’s invitation has been waiting for her. She knows it is for real, that is to know about each other and not just because it is his turn that weekend. She is expectant and nervous, but at the same time the situation makes her feel embarrassed about him. She feels in a bad movie from the cable TV. She decides to go, but he father will have to take the first step in the relationship’s reconstruction.
On his side, Emilio knows he has to be the first in trying to communicate, but he does not know why. It is hard for him to enter her daughter’s world, and he also does not know if he should. She feels invading her.
So they start the trip waiting for the road to tell them how, and this road is generous and offers them all the opportunities they never gave to each other.
Father and daughter happens in the Chilean mountains, a place that will surround this family drama. The factor of using the nature as a whole another character is crucial in the relationship between the father and the daughter, considering that all the un-love and resentment that she feels about him (negative and somehow not-beautiful elements) grow in this place that is completely the opposite, a wonderful and quiet space.
This is why a very important issue about the script is the Atmosphere that the characters are relating to. These characters want to have a day of stillness, peace, affection, getting to know each other. However, because of the father’s inability to climb a mountain, along with the weather, something completely opposite happens. In the moment they get lost, everything turns dark, cloudy and cold. The atmosphere and the place become some kind of monster, who will make them company throughout the whole trip.
According to this, in the first half of the store the conversations are pretty superficial and domestic, even though there is a conflict that can be perceivedamong lines. The second half is when the characters are already lost and everything is dense, including the weather, the colours, the sounds and the dialogues.
The atmosphere will develop through the ironic dialogues that the characters will have, the animals’ sounds they will hear (some of them will create terror and fear in them) and the way the silence is going to be used in the sequences. This will play a role for the suspense, and at same time, for the characters’ discord.
Antonia, in spite of her young age, is a manipulative girl, and that is how the relationship with her father works. Manipulation for him to give her gifts, money and permissions. Things her mother does not give her, trying to educate her. The idea of this trip as way to be able to ask him to give her a breast surgery comes from here.
All these factors are things that I have seen happening in the separate parents’ children. They are all stuck in the middle of a love relationship that is not theirs, and are used to each side for their own convenience. This is something that Antonia’s character will show during the story: the fact that she did not have the guilt of being a problem child, but it was more an adults’ problem that could not be resolved.
The movie comes from an auto-biographical story, when in 2004 my father and I got lost in the mountains for two days and had to FACE the bad weather, and the lack of food and water, until we were finally rescued by the police’s helicopter. The experience brought us together and we could understand each other as human beings, more than as a father and a son.
The idea of making this movie is to finish the understanding what happened to me that weekend, something that also happens to several separate parents’ children. Everybody talks about us as a psychological and a sociological case as an abstract, but few of them do from what happens to the ones who are involved. Because of this, the script has a remarkable authorial load, since my idea is to narrate stories about things that I know about. In this moment it would be hard for me to tell a story about something that I hadn’t lived. I haven’t been to a war; I haven’t lost my beloved beings yet. This is why I try to tell small stories that represent closely my way to narrate.