“The Rescue is a performance piece,” says director Boris Castellanos. | Photo courtesy of Alvaro and Boris Castellanos

The 2019 Chutzpah Festival will be back in Vancouver from Oct. 24 to Nov. 24, 2019. The festival showcases music, theatre, comedy and dance from around the world, including Alvaro and Boris Castellanos’s documentary film The Rescue with live musical accompaniment.

Since the two filmmakers play bass and piano, respectively, they developed what they call a ‘live film-concerto’ to play alongside their film, while also contracting local musicians to help fill out the sound.

Unique and impactful

The Rescue is about the two filmmakers’ grandfather, the ‘Righteous’ Colonel José Arturo Castellanos and how he and a Jewish friend saved the lives of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust by issuing them Salvadorian nationality certificates. Because the film subject was so extraordinary, the Castellanos brothers felt it needed something unique.

“When our film was coming together in the editing room, my brother Alvaro and I started to think about how we could tell the story in the most unique and impactful way – we wanted to do it in a way only we could do it,” says Boris Castellanos.

Soon the music became as important as the film itself and the brothers decided to push the boundaries of the traditional film screening, becoming closer to the film and the audience all at once.

“Having already started choosing pieces of music to compliment our narrative, we decided to go a step further. The idea was to expand the traditional film format by integrating synchronized, live performances of these special musical pieces from the 30s and 40s by a 7-piece Latin chamber orchestra led by Alvaro and I, and in a sense do away with the invisible barrier between the film screen and the audience,” Castellanos explains.

The first performance of what the brothers call a ‘live film-concerto’ was at the German Federal Foreign Office in Berlin, formerly the headquarters of the Reichsbank. It was there the filmmakers received an overwhelmingly positive response from the audience and knew they were on the right track.

Very expensive therapy

Castellanos says an ambitious project like this comes with the standard challenges of any film and a few other challenges that are not so standard. He explains that the massive scope of the story meant they had to travel multiple times to the USA, El Salvador, Germany, Switzerland and Israel to interview Holocaust survivors and descendants of the Colonel. With only some support from a small number of benefactors and a small artist grant from the Ontario Arts Council, many of the costs were covered with great personal sacrifice by the filmmakers. The Holocaust survivors were of advanced age and therefore the brothers felt they couldn’t wait for all the funding to come through before starting the filming process. They embraced a ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ policy and because of that, they are still trying to recoup expenses. However, they feel the process has all been worth it.

“When we speak to audiences after performances, we like to joke that working on this project was like very expensive therapy,” says Castellanos. “Throughout the process, as we learned more about our grandfather – whom we never met – his great deeds and his complicated family life. We were able to better understand and deal with long-standing issues we had with our own father, the Colonel’s troubled son. Another rewarding aspect for the brothers is having the opportunity to speak to younger generations about the importance of humanitarianism, standing up to injustice and honouring those who did the right thing.

Hope in humanity

The product that resulted from all this hard work is meant to inspire, says Castellanos.

“Philosophically, our hope is that the audience comes away with a sense of hope in humanity and are inspired by this unlikely story of collaboration between a Salvadoran diplomat and his Jewish friend whose positive impact on humanity is immeasurable,” says Castellanos. “Since The Rescue is a performance piece, the ultimate reward is when the audience is visibly moved by the combination of the beautiful music, images and the inspirational subject matter.”

The Rescue will be performed at the Norman Rothstein Theatre on Nov. 23.

For more information, go to www.chutzpahfestival.com.