A quick update

Well, at this very moment Amy is in New York to present her first film, Sirwiñakuy, at the CineKink NYC festival. She left Thursday morning at 5 AM, via Bogota and arrived, safely into JFK at exactly 8 30 pm. She spent seven hours in Bogota..

She’s very excited, of course, to the point that the whole idea of going to New York to show off her first baby made her forget the rough three days she had shooting the public flogging scene in Dead But Dreaming.

She still has the marks.

We went through our eleventh day of shooting Sunday, which was cut short by a torrential rain when we were in the middle of having a lot of fun watching Moira (Amy), being flogged in public.

The rain lasted for about 3 hours and it was torrential. After it was over there, was little time in the day to continue so the flogging was postponed ’til next day, a Monday.

We had to continue the flogging that Monday, and on that same day we had to finish her off. Her execution, I mean. We were shooting from 9 am to 8 pm non stop and Amy had to be naked all of that time… tough, really tough because for the most part the day was cold. Indeed it was the hardest day for Amy.

One amazing thing was that this is the very first time we involved a large number of people in a scene like this, a public flogging, where our lady was in front of so many people, most of whom had never, ever seen anything like it, and she was naked too.

The actors were truly impressed, but not only the actors. We were shooting at a museum and on Monday there were a lot of people in their offices surrounding the yard where we set up the scalfold.

They were stunned. Watching the nasty proceedings from behind their windows, or from the balconies, never in view of the cameras, of course . And the flogging itself was real enough. The sound of the whip on Amy’s flesh was loud enough to make everybody squirm.

Her acting was, as always, superb, and many a person thought that it was real, that she wasn’t acting at all, that she was suffering.

And this went on for hours, to have all the angles Jac wanted and to make it look as good as humanly possible.

When later we saw the rushes, there were tears in Amy’s eyes, all that suffering was paying off. The cinematography was amazing, the set was amazing, the acting was amazing… so the scene was working very, very well.

It was hard to pull it off and Jac was visibly anxious throughout, struggling with his vision and Amy’s well being. How far can he push? For how long? Is it going to rain again?

There were issues with the limitation of time.

We had until that Monday to finish two separate and complex scenes. They were so complex that we scheduled TWO days to make them. We only had one now.

Amy was leaving the 9th, Vero the 15th, so we were in a tight schedule and lots to shoot that day. The rain the previous day delayed the work. The Public Flogging Scene was schedule to be done that Sunday and we couldn’t even do half of it.

Nerve wracking. But Jac pull it off, pushing his actors like they were chess pieces, making them do the impossible and ending the day past 8 pm, in the dark with a very bloodied Amy laying on the platform.

At the end of the shooting, she began to show symptons of a light fever. She was worried because she still had one scene to shoot, outdoors, at night. The scene of her arrest and we could not wait until her return because we had to return all those fancy uniforms. So, next night, there we were, in the middle of our colonial street, at night, shooting Amy’s scene.

BTW, when Amy is arrested, after questioning, she raped by four soldiers. Rough scene, hard to look, harder to shoot.

When Amy finally took a good shower, Jac could see that all those whipping marks on her body were the real thing, sans the blood, of course. The blood was an effect.

We met our schedule, Amy was a bit sick, but happy and now she’s in New York, to shine on her own, to show her film, bask in the glory of having a New York audience watch her Opera Prima, Sirwiñakuy.

And now a translation. Por bocona le metí la pistola translates to I stuck a pistol in her because she’s a big mouth.

Tonight we’re celebrating the screening of Sirwiñakuy in NY and the completion of HALF of the shooting. Yes, we celebrate in parts. We still have a lot of hard scenes where Mila and Amy suffer still a whole lot. Lots of nasty goings in this one.

BTW, Maleficarum will not be shown at the Cinemateca…. it was CENSORED… yes, really. Their feeble excuse is that it contains “EXPLICIT CONTENT” and they do not have the proper time to show it. Lame. We’re beginning a war of concepts now. Because if they show films like The Rasberry Reich, that has guys masturbating under the portrait of Che Guevara, which I think is very explicit, why can’t they show a proper inquisition movie?

I’m guessing the Censorship Comittee didn’t like a woman bound over a pit of hot coals.