DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

The film takes place in Cochabamba, a small Bolivian city surrounded by mountains, where the weather is always the same and where people seems to be in eternal and comfortable lethargy despite the city's constant growth.

I started the film project with the very unconventional idea - in Bolivian cinema particularly - of working with a non-traditional script design in order to achieve a film with a hyper-realistic look and feeling. The main actors, Pablo Milan (Berto), Roberto Guilhon (Victor) y Alejandra Lanza(Camila), did not know the script nor the plot, only the relationship between them. For each scene they went out into the streets of chaotic Cochabamba, playing scenes against passers-by and establishing a connection with their surroundings.

“THE MOST BEAUTIFUL OF MY VERY BEST YEARS,” originated from a personal need to portray my generation in Bolivia. Born in the late 70’s and early 80’s, we are grandsons of the Revolution of 52, sons of dictatorships, nowadays trustees of democracy and a neo-liberal system. My generation is the generation of DESINTEREST, a generation without big dreams or big aspirations, overwhelmed by our parent’s frustrated idealism, with the weight of an ancestral culture over our shoulders and the demands of a consumerist and male chauvinist society.

Berto, the lead character in the film, is based on Goethe’s Werhter, the XVIII century romantic literary character who ends up his life for a woman’s love. Before writing this film I asked myself ¿what would happen with a man so passionate as Werhter living in a time like ours?, ¿would this romantic be able to find in the city of Cochabamba, in the XXI century, a feeling so profound so he would be willing to died for? These questions brought into being the rest of my characters, common middle class guys whose only occupation is to lay down under the sun, cruise the city by car and think about sex. Although they are always together, deep down they are lonely and detached beings, seeking desperately to give some sense to their existence.

Because the film was shot digitally with a particular sense of experimentation, it acquires a special texture and a personal time consciousness. I realized the only honest way to get close to these characters would be to position the narrator within the story as another character. Almost like an insect or a spy hidden behind objects and walls, simply observing – sometimes being caught by a mirror reflection or it’s own shadow - without pretending to explain or understand the character’s actions, and without knowing more than what the character’s know about each other. In order to achieve the spontaneity and sense of hyper-realism this narrative demands, I had to rely on unconventional methodologies such as not allowing the actors to know the story, shooting chronologically, work with a hyper reduced crew, and shooting on location without introducing objects and elements foreign to such location (similar to some of the Dogme 95 vows of chastity).

This methodology and the experimentation with new technologies on video opened a wide set of new possibilities to achieve the narrative language of the piece, from an almost behaviorist optic and similar to artist like Wong Kar Wai, Michelangelo Antonioni, Reymond Carver, Harmony Korine and Tsai Ming Liang, among others. I am interested in exploring the human relations within small social spheres. In a society as diverse, contradictory and as culturally complex as mine the possibilities become infinite.