Liverpool
In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, Farrel asks the captain of the freighter he works on for permission to go ashore once they reach the port of Ushuaia, the southernmost town of Argentina. Farrel wants to return to his birthplace and see if his mother is still alive. For the past twenty years he has worked as a seaman. He drinks to oblivion, pays the women he sleeps with, has no friends. Having reached the cluster of snow-covered houses where he grew up, Farrel discovers his mother is indeed still living but someone else has become part of the family.
Credits
Pro Material
Would you like to show this movie?
Please fill out our form.
Feel free to contact us
Press voices
Lisandro Alonso
«For me a script or a treatment is a sort of guide. A guide that helps me to structure a scene before we start shooting a scene, or what I find in a natural location and what I remember of the people and their gestures when I first met them. What I manage to see in others is always more intriguing to me than what came out of my own head. All I wanted to do is film as the days go by, establish a relationship with the protagonist and the crew and just let things emerge as time passed. Unlike the previous films we made which were shot in four weeks or less, we spent more time, a couple of months, in the middle of the winter, near the southernmost city in the world, in the midst of the cold, the snow, the forest and the sea, in the company of an alcoholic that returns after twenty years to see if his mother is still alive. A man who works in cargo vessels traveling from one place to another, from North to South, from East to West, all thoughts revolving around the boat, its inhabitants and the ocean around them. What interests me in Farrel, the main character, is what he gets from the world he lives in, his submission, his loneliness, his lack of motivation and his lack of hope that something might change, that his life might be different, that he might have the possibility of relating to someone without distrust, without thinking he will be ill-treated. I would like to try and see what goes on in his head full of dark, blurred memories and hangovers. I wanted to follow the steps of someone running to hide away when he sees someone approaching, who does not want to communicate, who wants
to be on his own, and whose single unsettled debt is with his mother, who can barely breath and who cannot communicate with others anymore.
I would like to film his face when he learns that he has a new, very close relative, younger than him, who lives in the same town and sleeps with anyone to survive and who supports his mother. And in the end I would like to see if that encounter can change the way he lives, if those two people will let themselves feel something they have never
felt for anyone else before, if finding a relative whose existence they were not aware of can change their view of the world. I would like to know if Farrel can look her in the eye. I would like to know what Farrel did to his mother.