Los Desheredados

Spain

Synopsis

LOS DESHEREDADOS is a portrait of the director's father facing the end of his family business. Pere Ferrés is 53 years old and owns a small bus company. Lack of money forces him to drive clients who destroy his vehicle to bachelor parties, but he is not prepared to lose his dignity.

Director's Statement

Family is usually the central theme of my work and I tend to include personal anecdotes in my writing. However, I take a step forward with LOS DESHEREDADOS in that I have created a portrayal of both my father and grandmother. Shooting with my family I wanted to blur the line between fiction and documentary: I enjoy working with real elements, but shaping them at will, using strategies from fiction to create a better truth.

This idea has been percolating in my mind, for years, although until now, I never dared to really take it on. When my father told me he had to close up shop due to the financial crisis however, I realized that, now more than ever, it was time to make a filmic record of him. That initial urge turned into a need which subsequently stirred many things inside, which became impossible to ignore.


Among other things, I recalled a picture of me at the age of eight with a friend, pretending to be boarding a bus to school. My father wanted to use it to promote his company in the local paper. So, way before cinema would first catch my eye, way before I even knew what an extra was, my father made me stand there, with my back turned, holding my backpack. It occurred to me then that he could be the main character of my new short film, a snapshot of the end of a big moment in his life and closing of this cinematic circle. In this way, reflecting my belief that parents sow and children reap, that we start where they end.


The financial crisis has taken a toll on my family’s situation and specially my parents generation. So, this individual portrait also tries to be a generational one, which I hope both women and men my father’s age and people from his socio-economic background can relate to. The truth is that I do not have any solutions to this social problem, but I would like to think that people, even in periods of crisis, do not conform. I believe that LOS DESHEREDADOS is an ode to dignity seen through the eyes of an individual man who has been his own boss for his entire life, a true self man.

Director's Biography

Laura Ferrés graduated in Film Direction from ESCAC (Spain).

A PERRO FLACO was her degree’s final project, a fiction short film selected by 60 festivals around the world such as SEMINCI 2014 (Spain) and Montreal World Film Festival 2015 (Canada).

LOS DESHEREDADOS, a hybrid between fiction and documentary featuring the director’s father and grandmother, is her second short film and it premiered at the Semaine de la Critique - Cannes 2017, where it won the Leica Cine Discovery Prize for Best Short Film in Competition.

Recently, it also won the Best European Short in Curtas Vila do Conde Film Festival, being therefore nominated for the European Film Awards.
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Cast & Crew

Directed by: Laura Ferrés

Written by: Laura Ferrés

Produced by: Valérie Delpierre

Cinematography: Agnès Piqué Corbera

Editing: Diana Toucedo

Sound Design: Alejandro Castillo

Cast: Pere Ferrés (Pere), Marian Alvarez (Mari)

Nominations and Awards

  • European Short Film 2017