In 2004, Fernando Trueba settled in Brazil to film The Miracle of Candeal. As it could not be otherwise, the director, a music lover, got lost in the record stores of Rio de Janeiro and discovered Tenório Jr., a great pianist of whom he had not heard, whom he had never heard before. tap.
Intrigued, Trueba began to investigate. “Between 2006 and 2007 I did about 150 interviews with family members, people who had known Tenório and musicians who had played with him.” The director spoke with some of the greats such as João Gilberto, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Vinicius de Moraes and Paulo Moura and was storing “a trunk” of material from which a film inevitably had to come out.
A film that could have different genres: musical, documentary, intrigue... “I ruled out shooting an intrigue film, because it would have been like an afternoon film for the platform, and I also abandoned the idea of making a documentary, although it was tempting, because it would have "It was the story of a missing person and what I wanted was to hear Tenório's music and reconstruct his era," explains the filmmaker in an interview with La Vanguardia.
So he opted for animation and “as I had done Chico y Rita (2010) with Javier Mariscal, I called him to get involved in the project.” While Trueba wrote the script, Mariscal “created the characters, recreated the environments and objects and chose the color palette, which was different to illustrate the memories than, for example, to reproduce the interviews,” explains the cartoonist.
“It took me four years to paint the film,” Mariscal recalls. And almost 20 years have passed since Trueba became interested in the whereabouts of the mysterious Tenório Jr. The same thing happens to Jeff, his alter ego and protagonist of They Shot the Pianist, a New York journalist who discovers the brilliant musician by chance and on a trip. from work to Rio de Janeiro inquires about his life.
He is pulling a thread that takes him to Buenos Aires in March 1976 a few days before the coup d'état. Tenório was on tour with Vinícius de Moraes and Toquinho, one night he left the hotel to buy some dinner. He never returned. He was kidnapped by an Argentine Navy task force and allegedly tortured and murdered.
He was only 34 years old, but he left his music as a legacy. The bossa nova sounds that he played in the Beco das Garrafas, the Copacabana alley where jazz was reinvented in the late 1950s. That street is one of the protagonists of They Shot the Pianist because Trueba wanted to “recover the musical atmosphere that illuminated Brazil in the 60s and 70s and that had already disappeared when I began to conceive this film.”
They Shot the Pianist, which also has a comic version, premiered at the San Sebastián Festival, where it received critical acclaim and caught the attention of half the world. “The film will be screened at around 30 festivals in India, the United States, Canada, Italy and Australia. We cannot go to all of them, but we will surely go to those in France, Portugal and Holland, who have co-produced the film,” concludes Trueba.
