Feature
Interview with P
by Maria Rochelle
I attended the Atlanta Film Festival
on Sunday, April 3 and was so
excited to meet and network with
individuals in the film industry. I
met Paula Schargorodsky who is an
Argentine filmmaker, director, and
screenwriter, of “35 and Single.” We
talked briefly and later I interviewed
her. I did watch the short of the
film which New York Times
encouraged her to make before the
feature film was produced. The film
was screened at All Lights India
International Film Festival back in
November 2015 in Kerala, India. It
was recently premiered at the
Atlanta Film Festival on April 8.
Here’s a description of the film
from the Facebook page.
“Over the past 10 years, I've been
compulsively filming everyone and
everything for no particular reason.
All my love stories and breakups
have been recorded and
systematically kept.
As I continued to change boyfriends and
hometowns every two years or so, I filmed my
friends with their boyfriends, then husbands,
then pregnant bellies, until they were surrounded
by children. When my last single friend from
school married, I fell asleep the evening of the
wedding and didn’t show up.
I’m 35, Argentine, Jewish and single.
And these four categories don’t seem to go
smoothly together. So I decided to make a film
about the questions I have struggled to answer.
Can social mandates be disregarded, or is my
extended youth finally coming to its end?”
What inspired you to make this film?
It wasn’t that I was inspired, the film just
happened. I was always, always shooting. As a
child, I always had a camera. All of my friends
and family were used to seeing me with a
camera. At the beginning of the film, it was
called “The Girl behind the Camera” because I
also hide a little bit behind the camera and
socialize through the camera. It was my life.
Wherever I went, I would use my camera…at a
supermarket…artist exhibition..Just where ever.
I had hours and hours of footage with no
meaning at all.