With Cine Si, I tried to square the circle. One one hand, I had to sell a TV series, a product I didn't want to make, because it is boring to do the same thing all the time. But there is a real market for TV series. On the other hand, it enabled me to shoot the short films I did want to make, but that had no market.
Here is the concept: three friends meet in an old cinema where they invent, gather information and dress up in costumes. This is a TV series, the same characters appear every night in the same decor. But once the friends are on stage, each story becomes one of my free-standing short films.
TV channels were not convinced, and I only got the funds for 8 stories, when I had 20 ready to be shot. But it was an immense satisfaction to shoot this series, in the countryside, with very little means, a simplicity that is not conceivable today. It involved lots of ingenuity, a small team and constant pleasure.
M.O.