- by Alexander Joseph Kinzel
"TO LIVE DOING WHAT I LOVE"
With a sardonic humor, he can’t seem to help carrying into his art, the Spanish born filmmaker Lander Camarero says that at seventeen he decided to be an artist because “he realized he was terrible at everything else.” But behind the self-deprecation and the cool guy sarcasm, there is something deeply true in Lander’s work. Watching the hodge-podge of footage from Pressure Filmak’s Reel (Lander’s production company) one can see Lander’s incredible vision and dark humor all blended together and spread out on an international scale.
Screenshot of "The Coffee Advisors. Episode 1". image courtesy of Pressure Filmak
From shark fishing with a spear gun on the tip of the speeding sailboat, to a comedic investigation into 9/11, to mobsters shooting tommy guns into a blurry abyss; Lander is more than a producer, more than a story teller, he is a world builder and in his world, anything can be deconstructed or made vividly beautiful. He started with writing, because in his own words “it was the cheapest. art form”, but he quickly began to create little videos and films, these days considering himself mostly a screenwriter.
When asked about his creative process, Lander responded that “normally, it's a really long process.” He says he starts with “an idea, a place, an image or an interesting person.” Then he gets to know that person closely. This means, according to Lander, “sharing life for a short but intense time. Getting drunk together helps a lot.” Then he gets out his laptop and begins to write ideas. Through his process of writing, he finds the main idea of what he is trying to write and this idea summarizes that character and what he likes most from them. Lander then links the secondary ideas and creates the structure of the story.
This is the process of a man who “just wants his stories to look real. Even if he uses too much imagination or manipulated images, he always tries to get realism in those characters. The rest is secondary.” Despite the humor or maybe within the humor in Lander’s films, the audience is able to feel the very palpable reality of the images on the screen whether it is a sideways glance or an explosion in the distance, the viewer is brought through the screen into this masterfully engineered plane, hand built by Lander.
"The Union" intro. Image courtesy of Pressure Filmak
No matter the subject matter, Lander Camarero believes that there can be humor found in it and that through this humor a complexity of emotions will emerge be it sadness, anger or hysteria. He is currently writing, directing, and producing a project called “The Coffee Advisors”, which is “a comedic Web Series about a bunch of conspiracy theorist trying to solve the biggest mystery of our recent history: 9/11.” For Lander, there is nothing off limits and in trying to ascertain what he will do next, he responded that his next project "The Union", that will be launched in 2020, is “A 30 min mob-movie in which we will know the guts of one of the oldest and unknown unions in the world: The New York Wedding Video Producers." We are sure laughs are guaranteed.
LANDER CAMARERO
SPAIN
