Still: Synthesize Me - Bear Damen

“I wrote this idea as a personal allegory,” Bear Damen explains the very personal origins of his 80s-set film Synthesize Me, (sales/distribution by New Europe Film Salesand world-premiering in the Narrative Short Competition at SSXW March 8).

The young director of Dutch-Indonesian descent adds that the movie was also inspired by his “love for synthesizers.”

Damen grew up within Dutch ship-building family. His father is a passionate sailor. As a youngster, Bear would spend several months a year on far-flung voyages, starting in Rotterdam and sailing around the world - and being home-schooled en route.

The setting of Synthesize Me is neither nautical nor Dutch. Rather, it’s a small town not far from Mexico City. Violeta (Ivanna Plantier) is in mourning after the death of her mother and tries to reconnect with her by getting into her music workshop and playing her synths. But she causes a massive power cut. As the lights go out around town, her father (Antonio Trejo Sanchéz), an electrical maintenance worker, is terrified he will lose his job.

“Both characters are relying on it [the electricity]. One of them makes art with it while the other views it just as a rational source of work,” says Damen, who made the film through Couscous Films, the outfit Damen runs with Salim El Arja.

The director originally intended to make the film in Lancaster in northern Los Angeles County, where the grim finale of David Fincher’s serial killer movie Se7en was shot. That proved too expensive. However, he had been in Mexican towns where pylons “glitched” continually and where people would tap the energy illegally. While conducting his research, he made contact with a Mexican women-led local production company, Violeta Films, and decided south of the border would be the ideal setting for his movie.

Damen held an open casting to find the two leads. Plantier, “an instant choice,” already had screen experience (she played one of the drug lord’s daughters in Narcos: Mexico). Meanwhile, he chose Sanchéz to play her emotionally distant father because of “his eyes.” All the crew were Mexican. 

Although Damen has his own “pre-MIDI” synthesizers [from before 1983] back home in Amsterdam, he found the musical equipment in Mexico.  “Luckily, we found a guy who goes by the name of Akira Honda who had a huge synth archive,” the director remembers.

There is a bravura sequence midway through the film showing how Violeta’s musical tinkering causing the outage. The filmmakers didn’t have a ”huge budget” but used fake fireworks, clever editing and effects, along with some stock footage to show lights going out everywhere. 

And, yes, although Synthesize Me is a very Mexican story with very Mexican characters, it does draw on elements of his own life. As a young man in the Netherlands, there was a hope that all children would find their place within the shipbuilding business. It took some time for his artistic and filmmaking ambitions to be accepted.

“There were definitely a few difficult years in terms of understanding between me and my dad. It [the film] is a magnification of it, an allegory of it. But it’s definitely that thing where your dad just does not understand you and doesn’t want you to do the things you are doing….” 

The director’s filmmaking experience so far has been very much in short form. “I’ve done a lot of music videos and I’ve done commercials,” he explains. Now, though, the director is contemplating a feature length movie exploring some of the same coming of age themes addressed in Synthesize Me. 

“I do feel there is enough meat on the bone in that character to build out to a feature and make it maybe even more of a ghost story…in a sense, because it is her mom still lingering in the wires. I would definitely like to explore a feature version of that, still set in Mexico and about a town in Mexico that loses its electricity because this one girl couldn’t handle her grief.”

Damen has also written a screenplay for another short which he will use as a “proof of concept” for a potential  feature. This is a psychological horror drama. The working title is Tiny Little Cuts. 

In recent years, Damen has been racking up some impressive credits. He directed a music video for James Blake and was also one of the producers on the Cannes Camera D’Or winning feature War Pony, directed by Riley Keough and Gina Gammell.

“I live and breathe for making films,” he underlines.

South by Southwest is running from March 7 to 15, click here for the Dutch line-up.