A teenager falls in love with his best friend's sister. Looking at her and talking to her in front of his buddy and partner in crime thus becomes an almost impossible task. But what is the young man in love feeling? A strong desire to talk to her, mixed with the fear that his feelings won't be reciprocated and that his best friend will find out.
This situation, which many teenagers experience, is the one depicted in the short film "De mi mejor amigo" by Ilan Rosenfeld (26), who graduated in 2010 with a Bachelor’s degree in Audiovisual Communication and won First Prize in the Best Uruguayan Short Film category at the "11th International Film School Festival," organized by the Uruguayan Film School from October 28 to 31.
The prize consists of tools and materials for making a short film. Ilan will develop the screenplay for another romantic story, titled "Love in the Hallway," which is inspired by the film director Billy Wilder, because "it's a script with a comedic structure where you know from the start that the couple who meet will end up falling in love; it's a given," he explained.
While taking Production Workshop 4 during his eighth semester of college in 2009, Ilan told a friend about a romantic experience from his teenage years. “A little while later, I went home and wrote down the basic idea (…) in which I sharpened certain details to make them more visible, even though they had been very deeply felt by me,” he recalled.
After writing the script, he got in touch online with a Paraguayan friend, a literature student, whom he had met during a study abroad program at the Universidad del Pacífico in Chile. "Faced with the need to create more realistic dialogue," the graduate asked his friend to help him portray the characters’ conversation; Ilan played the role of his teenage self, while the young Paraguayan took on the role of the graduate’s friend’s sister.
During his studies, the graduate “gained real-world experience.” “Before I started my studies, I had a very childish or naive view of art—a very romantic perspective that I haven’t entirely lost.” Ilan recalls that the critical perspective of some of his professors made him “think” and “shaped” him as a creator. His “great luck,” he explains, was having a group of classmates with a “keen sensitivity to the arts and observation of the world” similar to his own.
Interview published in December 2010