Not everyone can count Chantal Akerman as their mentor, but when writer/director Alex Lora went to further his cinema studies at City College of New York, he struck up a friendship with the director of Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which lasted until her death in 2015.
“The main lesson I learned from Chantal, and something she told me constantly, was not to be afraid, that you have to carry on despite the mistakes you make,” says Lora, who also studied audiovisual communication at the Blanquerna-URL faculty in Barcelona. “She was incredibly brave. She did not care about what other people thought, nor much about rules in a very liberating way. She was extremely inspiring.”
While in New York, Lora started making documentary shorts. Odysseus’ Gambit, about a Cambodian chess player in New York, went to Sundance 2012 as did Godka Cirka: A Hole In The Sky, about a Somalian shepherd, two years later. His debut doc feature Thy Father’s Chair, co-directed with Antonio Tibaldi, premiered at International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam in 2015. It follows twin Orthodox Jewish brothers in New York who must face up to their past when threatened with eviction from their cluttered home.
An experienced documentary filmmaker and editor, Lora has worked for PBS, Netflix, HBO, Amazon, Movistar Plus+ and Filmin. Now he has turned his sights on fiction with the feature Unicorns, centring on love, relationships and work challenges through the eyes of a young woman, played by Greta Fernandez (A Thief’s Daughter).
While waiting on news of a festival premiere for Unicorns, Lora is developing his follow-up at the Catalan Film Academy script residency programme. The screenplay is based on the summer 2017 jihadist terrorist attack in Barcelona and Cambrils, which killed 16 people.
“When I started getting seriously into cinema, I loved Truffaut, Godard, Chris Marker, and I was fascinated by Italian neorealism” says Lora. “If I had been asked what kind of film I wanted to make back then, I would have probably answered, ‘Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris.’ Now I also say, ‘Why not Interstellar, too?’ Even if it was as an editor.”
Contact: Alex Lora
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