Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

July 2 - 10, 2010

Whisky
( Whisky )

Colour, 35 mm
Uruguay, Argentina, Spain, Germany, 2004, 95 min
Section: Another View

Director: Juan Pablo Rebella,Pablo Stoll
Screenplay: Pablo Stoll, Juan Pablo Rebella, Gonzalo Delgado Galiana
Dir. of Photography: Bárbara Álvarez
Music: Pequena Orquesta Reincidentes
Designer: Gonzalo Delgado Galiana
Editor: Fernando Epstein
Producer: Fernando Epstein
Production: Control-Z Films, Co-production: Rizoma Films, Wanda Visión, Pandora Filmproduktion
Sales: Bavaria Film International
Contact: Bavaria Film International

Cast

Andrés Pazos, Mirella Pascual, Jorge Bolani

Synopsis

Jacobo Koeller, the owner of a failing sock factory, lives a quiet, bachelor life until the day his brother shows up, a man he hasn’t seen in years. In order not to feel inferior in front of his more successful brother, Jacobo comes up with the idea of asking his faithful employee Marta to pretend to be his wife. The aging woman fulfils this new task as inventively as everything else she has done for her impractical employer. Almost strangers to each other, the three characters accept the rules of the game: they will play members of a loving family while the energetic Hermann is visiting. Not surprisingly, this leads to a number of absurd situations. Whisky is the second feature from the Uruguayan duo Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll. The film takes place in Montevideo but it could have played out anywhere as a universal story of loneliness exacerbated by the characters’ age.

About the director

Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll (both b. 1974, Montevideo) met at university where they studied mass communications. Together they wrote and filmed an animated series called “El service.” In 2001 they wrote, shot and produced the low-budget film 25 Watts, screened in the Forum of Indepedents at Karlovy Vary in 2001, and awarded at many festivals. Their next film, Whisky, was highly popular with both critics and audiences at this year’s Cannes festival, winning the Jury Prize in the section Un certain regard, as well as Best Screenplay from the Sundance Institute. Director Stoll had this to say about the film: “We started to realize that perhaps these characters were not much different from ourselves... That they could be a projection...of what we might be in twenty, thirty years.”