Red Marten| València (EFE).- A food delivery man with debts, trans prostitutes, a porn actor or an unemployed single mother are some of the protagonists of director Sean Baker’s filmography, which portrays lives outside the American dream, models ” of alternative capitalism” on the margins of cities.
The director of ‘The Florida project’, ‘Tangerine’, ‘Take out’ or ‘Red rocket’, who this Thursday received the Luna de València award at the inaugural gala of the Cinema Jove festival, defends, in an interview with EFE, a cinema “that humanizes and allows empathy” with different lives, which sometimes call into question the traditional models of family, work or community.
avoid condescension
“Sometimes, art tends to represent those realities by condescending to these people and forgetting that we all have flaws, that in everyone’s life there are good things and bad things,” he says.
For Baker, the economic or social circumstances of the protagonists “are not the plot” nor do they limit the story: “If not, it falls into looking at others as others, as beings that are alien to us.”
Far from the dramatic stories of self-improvement, in the films of the American filmmaker the protagonists function normally in their precarious lives.
Thus, in ‘Tangerine’, for example, what worries the protagonist trans prostitute is not having been in jail, but that her boyfriend has cheated on her, and in the same way the protagonist girl of ‘The Florida project’ spends the summer playing with his friends in a motel behind Disneyland while his mother prostitutes herself.
Justice and history
“Of course I want to deal with important issues, deal with injustice, but I want to give the general public the chance to connect with the story,” says the director who, for this, is committed to “injecting humor” into the daily lives of these characters.
All of them live “universal” stories despite not having “usual” lives, and Baker also focuses on the importance of community: “We all need a helping hand, whether it’s family, friends, or someone who We don’t expect it to help us.”
“I realize that I have dealt with sex work five times in my films, in addition to the illegal or criminalized economies,” admits the filmmaker, for whom the illegal sale of clothing, the work of delivery men or the porn movies cause him a “sociological fascination”.
People with no place in capitalism
That, he says, is what he finds interesting about life outside the centers of big American cities, in neighborhoods “that are normally portrayed in the movies in a very superficial way,” where “people have no place in normal capitalism and they have to look for other means to survive, businesses with different rules, an alternative model of capitalism”.
The city, its people and its stories are for Sean Baker “a better education than that received in the classroom” and that is what he tries to film, a job that he considers “selfish” because it allows him to learn and entertain himself, while “capturing the debt” that he has had since he started going to the movies as a child.
Regarding whether he considers his cinema to be political, he believes that “every story, every film is”, especially living in a country “so divided” as the United States.
no intention of preaching
But he assures that he keeps an “open mind” and has friends “on both sides of the aisle” -left and right- and that, above all, he never wants to “preach”: “I do not want to alienate 50% of my audience.”
What he intends, rather, is to keep his political vision “disguised and hidden” while putting social problems on the table “without telling the viewer how to deal with them or what to think.”
Despite the fact that he was born in 1971 (he is 52 years old) and, “by age, he would be more in the generation of Paul Thomas Anderson or Quentin Tarantino”, Sean Baker is happy about the distinction of a young film festival, which makes him feel “about the age of Chloé Zhao (41 years old, director of ‘Nomadland’) or Barry Jenkins (43, director of ‘Moonlight’)”.
He acknowledges that there is a “young cinema” in a broad sense, not so much related to age but to “freshness, the desire to innovate and connect with youth”, but beware of labels because “who sees himself as part of a generation they may not be encouraged to seek renewal”.
His inspiration in the cinema
For this reason, this director, who says that he started “late” in the cinema because he went out “a lot of parties” when he was 20 years old, finds the greatest cinematographic inspiration in filmmakers like Gaspar Noé or Lars von Trier, who in their films show a certain ” youthful rebellion that never ends”.
The label of young and innovative was given to Baker, above all, as a result of his film ‘Tangerine’, shot with iPhone cameras, a combination “of his own style and low budget”.
But the second, he assures EFE, weighed more than the first: “Many young people thank me that this way of recording gave them the confidence to go to the cinema and make movies with their mobile phones, and I celebrate it but I tell them: ‘Congratulations, but next time try a camera.’”
Sean Baker does not want to reinvent cinema or constantly worry about technical innovations, but instead defends an “author’s cinema shot to be seen in theaters”, although he is aware that the closure of theaters after the pandemic and the rise of streaming platforms ‘streaming’ are changing the sector.
The filmmaker has found “a way to live” but assures that “there is not much money in the cinema if you are not making Marvel movies or big studios”, the type of projects that have been offered to him but he has rejected because he can afford it. .
“But I am aware that I am one of the few who can, and that if I had children to support it would be different”, says Baker, who concludes: “It is my way of making art, and for it I am going to fight”.