love me tender arises from a personal urgency but is sustained on an already proven cinematic practice: a way of making cinema that bets on the experimental, not as a rarity, but as the most honest way to tell certain stories.

Since its inception, love me tender has begun filming organically, with its own resources and in free time, as a creative and vital necessity. Several personal processes are already being documented on Hi8 and sound recordings, while part of the film is being constructed in dialogue with a co-editor who has accompanied the project since its genesis. 

The project delves into themes of love, heartbreak, grief, and the ongoing process of building and rebuilding a home, both literally and metaphorically. It explores the concept of perpetual construction in relationships and personal growth, as well as the journey of healing. The filmmakers involved in this project strongly believe in the transformative power to transmute individual loss into a shared experience of healing.

By sharing Sofía's intimate experiences, the film creates a vulnerable space for viewers to connect with their own encounters with these universal themes. The narrative moves fluidly between past and future, using Sofía's dreams as a canvas to reimagine possibilities beyond heartbreak and loss. The film's approach interweaves various documentary techniques, including the use of archival material to provide historical context and depth. By combining these methods with fictional elements, the project bridges the gap between personal memory and collective experience, inviting viewers to reflect on their own journeys of love, loss, and renewal.

The film has two perspectives: one filmed through Sofía’s gaze (all archival footage shot on a hi8), and a second one through an external camera that both accompanies and re-imagines reality through the present. It is through film-language that it creates a palimpsest on Love, where it constructs meaning at the same time as it juxtaposes it, oscillating between audiovisual poetics and concrete poetry. The film asserts that fiction can only attempt at a representation of love through illustrating exchanges. While the film does not aim to eliminate these forms of representation—acknowledging their value within specific contexts—it uses the language of documentary to examine how love is portrayed. In doing so, it invites the spectator to critically reflect on whether they allow film to shape their understanding of relationships. Through the recreation of these moments, the film aims to find clarity within uncertainty, offering solace in the understanding that love is a vast and ever-expanding concept, transcending rigid boundaries and expectations.

Why make a documentary about love? How could it serve as a platform for transmutation? In reflecting on this question for myself, I realized how essential it is to create a film that navigates these topics with both a critical and open-hearted perspective. By questioning the ways we face vulnerability and conflict, the film seeks to inspire new approaches to these challenges. At the same time, it supports those who embrace their own wounds, as well as their partner’s, as grounding points for building healthier relationships. The film suggests that healthy relationships are not about arriving fully healed—an impossible standard—but about understanding healing as an ongoing process of mutual accompaniment and perpetual growth.

Due to the nature of my work—particularly through the lens of documentary and the way natural processes shape the fiction within filmmaking—I understand that once we begin shooting, the project will inevitably evolve. This openness allows the film to come alive, remaining receptive to what reality may offer in further elaborating these questions and pursuits.

The film demystifies true love as pure and ethereal, reframing its purity through two pillars: reality and awareness. The first embraces ‘faults’ and ‘flaws’ as grounding qualities, and the latter is seen as prosaic acts of devotion through conscientious gestures of presence and active attention. Between these two, there is a constant effort to build better spaces and to understand love as something that must be nourished continually. Thus, a declaration of love does not stem from idealization, but rather from experiencing what it entails to dedicate waking life to improving the ways in which we relate, and the effort involved in remaining even when things shift.

As the film advances, it moves beyond my individual experiences. The process of editing and filming becomes a constant negotiation and reconciliation with that sadness and the drive to move forward. This tension allows the film to oscillate between vulnerability and a sense of strength and momentum. What becomes important is reconfiguring ourselves through a love in constant mutation.

The beauty of the film resides in the failure to contain love, explain it, where even enunciating it seems an insufficient, idle exercise, whose potential exists beyond the possibilities of language.