A young film director returns to Venezuela, inspired to make a film based on his father's life in the Amazon jungle (La Fortaleza, Jorge Thielen Armand). He casts Father to play himself. What starts as an act of love and ambition — filmmaking to more deeply understand the self, and the other — spirals into a process which confronts Father’s struggles with addiction and his life devoid of his son. EL FATHER PLAYS HIMSELF holds a steady lens to the way the act of cinema unearths, binds, heals and destroys.
Rodrigo Michelangeli is a Canadian-Venezuelan filmmaker based in Toronto. He is the co-writer, cinematographer and producer of the feature film La soledad (Jorge Thielen Armand, 2016), which premiered at the 73rd Venice International Film Festival and helmed the same roles in his sophomore feature La Fortaleza (2020) which premiered in the Tiger Competition at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam.