Use the search bar to find projects, completed films, and TFL community members.

Projects

The Succession

A father, as capable of loving as he is at destroying, drags his family into a downward spiral of violence and euphoria.

synopsis

The Succession explores the impact that Carlos, an overbearing father addicted to gambling, has on his 10-year-old daughter Cynthia, and on the rest of the family. The story opens in the summer of 1990 in Punta del Este, a Uruguayan beach resort where Argentina’s richest families spend their holidays. It concludes a few years later with the dead father’s legacy: a family buried under his debts. In the interim, Carlos appears as a charming entertainer at Cynthia’s birthday party, as a violent husband and a virtual ghost. But in The Succession, what can be seen is every bit as important as what cannot: the tension caused by an unpredictable father; the ambiguity of signs as we read them during childhood; the lack of explanation for much human behaviour; the helplessness in the face of a reality that marches on regardless.

Director’statement

The Succession is a portrait of a family dynamics focusing on the relationship between father and daughter. The family home is also a microcosm of 1990s Argentina. In it we see the values of Buenos Aires’s new rich, a country as unstable as the father himself and, finally, certain universal phenomena, such as the difficulty of loving our parents, the greater difficulty of not loving them, and the fact that sometimes, however wounding to our sensibilities, violence and love seem to alternate without excluding each other. It is not easy to fully identify with the characters of The Succession, and the film is therefore unlikely to stimulate much catharsis. Yet, at the same time it does not invite viewers to distance themselves through cynicism or irony. In their different ways, the characters of The Succession claim our empathy, that rare and nowadays so stifled capacity of human beings to experience the feelings of others.

TFL PROGRAMME:
ScriptLab 2018
Discover more details here:
Download
PDF
TFL Catalogue 2018

All the updates once a month in your mailbox, subscribe to the TFL newsletter.