Argentinian filmmaker Carlos Lascano talks about his inspirations and a reality beyond his life with the reporter Ayushi Sharma

Short films come with their own bag of concerns. Concerns, for example like making sure that  it retains depth of the story without losing details in the short format. However, the advantages outweigh the limitations as there is a lot more freedom attached to it which gives the director, opportunity to experiment.

Carlos Lascano, an Argentine director, who made Lila, a silent movie, said, “When I was a kid I spent most of my time making drawings, inventing characters, making small comic strips with sequences. I was a super shy kid. When you are drawing all alone, a point comes where you don’t like to socialise with the society because you have your own inner planet and you are happy in that small world of yours. You don’t need to socialise as you believe that nobody will ever understand you, your stories or the magic that you have in your head.”

Lascano was recently in New Delhi for a short film festival by STAR Movies Select HD and the reticent veteran talked about being an introvert as a young child with thousand ideas running in his head. “On my first day at school, I found myself confront the fact that I have to interact with other kids. When I came back that day I started crying and I told my parents that I don’t want to go back. My parents told me to shut up and ‘You will do what we want you to do’. But my grandmother was a very particular character, she loved magic and used to do things with tarot cards. For me, all those things were quite mysterious,” he said, adding that she was a strong influence in shaping up his creative process.

“One day she called me and asked, ‘why don’t you want to continue going to school?’ I told her I don’t feel confident. She made me a magic wand out of paper and took out a little bottle full of glitter from her closet. She convinced me that I have the power to do whatever I want with that wand.  I thought I would vanish all my classmates, but she said for doing anything I would have to ask her first, that was the limitation. So, next day I went to school knowing that I have this magic with me and suddenly I found myself completely confident,” he added.

The magic of storytelling that lets you mould worlds and universes is why he continues to love telling stories.

Lascano believes that reality is not limited to sensory perceptions, our imagination also shapes it. For him, every person has the magic to convince people, or to transform the reality in a different way.

His well-known short film Lila has a tickling tale behind its title. “(Laughs) When I work on any project, finding the title is the last thing that I do. But in this case, someone gave the title as ‘Point of you’ but I was definitely not satisfied with it. During shooting, the actress Alma García came on the sets and I called her, ‘Alma come here’, but she didn’t respond. I called to her again but she didn’t hear. Sometime later, she came and said ‘I’m not Alma anymore, I’m Lila’. I asked her why Lila? She unexpectedly replied, ‘I don’t know, I like it.’ I laughed and said okay Lila, let’s get started.” And that’s how the idea rolled in.

The concept of the film was like a game to him when he was a child. “I used to change reality with my imagination. I know, it’s tricky to change it but what I rely on is, if you can change that little portion of reality, then little by little maybe you can change the complete perception of reality.”

When asked if there was a similarity in his various works, he said, “Even if you don’t want, all your stories have something in common because somewhere or the other you are talking a little bit about yourself. If you are honest while directing and writing the story, you put a lot of yourself in it. That’s the commonality. The circumstances, characters and situations are diverse but the feelings, emotions, concepts belong to the same person. This is why there is some magical wire that gets all those things together,” he said.

Lila is part of a trilogy that began in 2008 with A Short Love Story in Stop Motion followed by A Shadow of Blue in 2011.

Writer: Ayushi Sharma

Courtesy: The Pioneer

Argentinian filmmaker Carlos Lascano talks about his inspirations and a reality beyond his life with the reporter Ayushi Sharma

Short films come with their own bag of concerns. Concerns, for example like making sure that  it retains depth of the story without losing details in the short format. However, the advantages outweigh the limitations as there is a lot more freedom attached to it which gives the director, opportunity to experiment.

Carlos Lascano, an Argentine director, who made Lila, a silent movie, said, “When I was a kid I spent most of my time making drawings, inventing characters, making small comic strips with sequences. I was a super shy kid. When you are drawing all alone, a point comes where you don’t like to socialise with the society because you have your own inner planet and you are happy in that small world of yours. You don’t need to socialise as you believe that nobody will ever understand you, your stories or the magic that you have in your head.”

Lascano was recently in New Delhi for a short film festival by STAR Movies Select HD and the reticent veteran talked about being an introvert as a young child with thousand ideas running in his head. “On my first day at school, I found myself confront the fact that I have to interact with other kids. When I came back that day I started crying and I told my parents that I don’t want to go back. My parents told me to shut up and ‘You will do what we want you to do’. But my grandmother was a very particular character, she loved magic and used to do things with tarot cards. For me, all those things were quite mysterious,” he said, adding that she was a strong influence in shaping up his creative process.

“One day she called me and asked, ‘why don’t you want to continue going to school?’ I told her I don’t feel confident. She made me a magic wand out of paper and took out a little bottle full of glitter from her closet. She convinced me that I have the power to do whatever I want with that wand.  I thought I would vanish all my classmates, but she said for doing anything I would have to ask her first, that was the limitation. So, next day I went to school knowing that I have this magic with me and suddenly I found myself completely confident,” he added.

The magic of storytelling that lets you mould worlds and universes is why he continues to love telling stories.

Lascano believes that reality is not limited to sensory perceptions, our imagination also shapes it. For him, every person has the magic to convince people, or to transform the reality in a different way.

His well-known short film Lila has a tickling tale behind its title. “(Laughs) When I work on any project, finding the title is the last thing that I do. But in this case, someone gave the title as ‘Point of you’ but I was definitely not satisfied with it. During shooting, the actress Alma García came on the sets and I called her, ‘Alma come here’, but she didn’t respond. I called to her again but she didn’t hear. Sometime later, she came and said ‘I’m not Alma anymore, I’m Lila’. I asked her why Lila? She unexpectedly replied, ‘I don’t know, I like it.’ I laughed and said okay Lila, let’s get started.” And that’s how the idea rolled in.

The concept of the film was like a game to him when he was a child. “I used to change reality with my imagination. I know, it’s tricky to change it but what I rely on is, if you can change that little portion of reality, then little by little maybe you can change the complete perception of reality.”

When asked if there was a similarity in his various works, he said, “Even if you don’t want, all your stories have something in common because somewhere or the other you are talking a little bit about yourself. If you are honest while directing and writing the story, you put a lot of yourself in it. That’s the commonality. The circumstances, characters and situations are diverse but the feelings, emotions, concepts belong to the same person. This is why there is some magical wire that gets all those things together,” he said.

Lila is part of a trilogy that began in 2008 with A Short Love Story in Stop Motion followed by A Shadow of Blue in 2011.

Writer: Ayushi Sharma

Courtesy: The Pioneer