Padre Nuestro [DVD]

Grand Jury Prize - Sundance 2007





First film by American director Christopher Zalla and winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2007 Sundance Festival, OUR FATHER comes to our screens after passing through the San Sebastián Film Festival.




On the surface, OUR FATHER is a thriller about a stolen identity case. However, at a deeper level, it deals with relationships within the family and the ambiguity of morality. The core of the film is a portrait of the labyrinth of lies and frustrated hopes that New York represents, a city where the majority of its inhabitants come from outside and where family is not defined by blood ties, but by shared experiences and by need for a link.




Synopsis: Pedro is a young Mexican who enters the United States illegally and manages to get to Brooklyn to meet the father he lost years ago. He wakes up in a truck completely alone and without his belongings. Juan, his traveling companion, has stolen everything, including documentation, to pretend to be him.




Christopher Zalla began writing the script for OUR FATHER a week after 9/11 because he felt the need to make a film about his city. Like many others, Zalla rushed to the World Trade Center to help with rescue efforts, a period of time in which he was able to see what brought people together. "Intellectually, I had always understood that New York was an international city, but I didn't understand it emotionally until that day. Suddenly, I felt how fundamental our desire to have a community was. We have built barriers, borders between us, yet it is ironic to think that we are all looking for connections, family ties.

New York is the ideal city to shoot a film about borders: there are visible and invisible borders. The clear separations between rich and poor neighborhoods; between the other four boroughs and Manhattan; between those who eat in luxury restaurants and the illegal immigrants who sweat in the kitchen a few meters away. But it is enough to get on the subway for the barriers to disappear.

The filming of the film included a team of people of more than 20 different nationalities, a true metaphor for the city and the film, "we were a bunch of strangers together, but we managed to create a family."