I CARRY YOU WITH ME
Festival Hit Opens the Tribeca Film Festival
I Carry You With Me carries personal meaning to director Heidi Ewing. For her, it’s a narrative about how two of her best friends fell in love in Mexico. To the audience, it’s a powerful gay love story that will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 15 to a sold out crowd.
The inspiration for the film started over a conversation at another film festival: Sundance. Her friends Iván and Gerardo came to support the premiere of her documentary Detropia. That night, the men told their love story over drinks at the hotel bar. They spoke of their immigration and what it was like to fall in love in Mexico.
Ewing was shocked that she hadn’t heard their story before. On her plane ride from Sundance, she jotted down all she could remember of their story and sent an email to herself titled “The Mexican Love Story.” Then, the obsession set in.
“I never thought I’d make a film about friends, but this was different,” Ewing says. “I wasn’t able to shake this story. I needed to tell it, obviously with their blessing and participation.”
Thus, the idea was born. For eight years, Ewing used her documentarian skills to film Iván and Gerardo, but she decided to craft her first narrative feature. Filming them helped with the scripts to capture their natural words.
The film itself spans years as it documents their love and move to New York. Armando Espitia plays Iván and Christian Vázquez takes on Gerardo. (Michelle Rodríguez also has a part as Sandra).
Even though Ewing is American, she speaks fluent Spanish. That, obviously, served as a huge advantage for not only communicating with her actors, but instilling trust in her as a director.
“I think my bond with the actors came from the way I encouraged ideas to flow through them rather than to just dictate my vision to them,” Ewing says. “The script was very well translated into Spanish, but I could feel in some of my private rehearsals that things weren’t coming to the actors as easily, so I started saying, ‘How would you say it?’ Also we would sit and they would tell me about their lives. One actor told me that growing up he felt like a co-conspirator in his father’s alcoholism, because his father would let him keep the change after he bought his booze. And I asked, ‘Can I use that?’”
I Carry You With Me is poised to be a big hit at Tribeca, and Ewing’s personal touch should not go unnoticed.
