The nearest thing to a formal cinematographic training for Chino Moya was some weeks doing workshops in San Antonio USA. In reality, he learnt the ropes of filming mainly through the hard work of being a general dogsbody on the sets of as many films as he could find, assisting in every possible capacity..
“This taught me the dynamics of how films were being made by professionals”.
This effective method of entering the film industry has largely been lost, with the huge amount of film schools that have proliferated in the last few years. But Chino Moya has proved, yet again that if you want something badly enough, you will succeed.
“I started to make my own mini- films… with a mini- camera and editing them at home, even before [ my short film,’ Out of Here’]. They were just tiny films, and there I learned the craft a little. I spent about a year making these home-made films and at one point, I think I got a little bit better at it with this experience. Then suddenly, I was offered the chance to do a music video for a friend of mine. I did it for her and I employed a little bit of a crew. Later, I did a mini- short film with my friends and then someone from an advertising production company saw it and I was offered the opportunity to direct commercials.”
Drambuie "Extraordinary Bar"- commercial
Chino Moya has never looked back. In no time, he was working with professional crews. But he was so busy with commercials and music videos, that his dreams of making a feature film seemed to be ever elusive.
“…I decided to move to London. It felt like I was starting all over again, coming to London from Spain… People didn’t take me very seriously and it took some time to build a reputation that people here would be happy with. It also took me time to understand the codes and the systems of this country. Suddenly, I was making music videos in the UK and at one point I was busy with that. Some got nominated as Best New Director for a series of videos. Then a couple of years later, I did a video for an American artist called St Vincent [ Digital Witness 2014] and that also got a few nominations.”
It is fascinating that already in these videos, Chino Moya reveals his fascination for dystopian. Worlds. See: Bright Minds “Solutions” (http://www.chinomoya.com/commercial/?zoombox=6 ). One of his last music videos,captures that same disintegrating atmosphere in the music video of Years and Years lead singer Olly Alexander singing “Eyes Shut”, (2015), an astonishingly complex production, all in no more than 3:43 minutes.
Years and Years lead singer Olly Alexander has now become famous in his own right and has been acting in a popular TV series in the UK, becoming one of the most prominent young queer artists on the scene. The TV series "It's a Sin"(Channel 4 and HBO MAX) depicts gay life in the 1980s and 1990s when the Aids crisis unfolded. Olly Alexander won critical acclaim for his role and he later brought out a cover version of the title hit song “It’s a Sin”. This track shows why people sometimes call him the new Nina Simone.
'Flat Filters' Comic book by Chino Moya and Tal Brosh
Chino Moya is a multi-talented, multi-media man. He not only works in film, but has also written a comic book to drawings by Israeli illustrator Tal Brosh, called “Flat Filters”, which is available in bookshops and online. It is a surreal and metaphorical journey of self- discovery. A young man wakes up to discover the world he knew outside has disappeared. Instead, he is faced with a plain yellow world with a flat blue sky. The other residents in his block have vanished and with his food and water dwindling, he realizes he has to venture out into that strange new world. There he has to confront his memories that meld with his current fate. This dark tale touches on humour and despair in equal measure. (https://www.brokenfrontier.com/flat-filters-tal-brosh-chino-moya/)
'Compton' image from the book 'Monosodium Glutamate'
Moya is also venturing into the world of photography, having created a book called “Monosodium Glutamate” that he has been working on for some time.
“It is a photography project I have been working on the side… alongside all my film work. I decided to do a series of fictional portraits. I rented an artist’s studio and I started building big sets and bringing actors into those sets and taking pictures of them. I also took some exterior shots in LA, London and Madrid. It’s a photographic series of portraits of white middle-aged men who are living on the fringes. They are all fictional and the intention now is to open a door and do some photographs that tell their own stories. The book should be available by the end of this year, but I’m a bit busy… My problem is that I do too many things at the same time and so I have to double up. I’m also a single father and my daughter spends half of her time with me. So, to be able to juggle everything at the same time is hard… I’m always busy, but the next thing I want to do it to publish that Photography book and release it and ideally, have an exhibition to accompany it."
All the while, Moya was developing the script for ‘Undergods’. One could ask where these dark themes come from?
“It’s interesting because with the movie, obviously, you need to pitch the idea… to convince people to give you money, a lot of money! Even for my movie, which is a tiny indie movie… you need an enormous amount of money! Obviously, when so much money is involved, you need to be very clear with your ideas, and very persuasive, so although I have always been obsessed with this dystopian totalitarian world, I had never put it into words, or never fully made up my mind about why that was the case, but then , as it’s a movie, well… I had to put it in writing … because I needed to convince these people to give me the money… Then, I ended up realizing that I was born in Spain, less than 2 months after Franco died. He was a dictator for 40 years so obviously I grew up at the very, very end of a dictatorship and at the beginning of a democracy. When I was born there was still no democracy but there was also no more dictatorship, we had neither, so it was like being in limbo. Probably one of my obsessions about these authoritarian and totalitarian regimes comes from the fact of having been born at the end of one and having [absorbed] the memories, mixed with the experiences of my parents and grandparents. Some of them ended up in jail and persecuted, so maybe it has something to do with that. Also, the experience of democracy and capitalism appearing in a country, as it did in Spain, with the broken dreams of the promises of democracy and capitalism.”
Johann Meyers playing Z in 'Undergods' (2020)
Moya also points out that the theme that recurs in ‘Undergods,’ of the dangers of a stranger entering your world and violently sending it off kilter, may also have an autobiographical element.
“…the truth is that I‘m an immigrant. I am the stranger who came from another country. Maybe not only that, because most of my friends in this country are British, so I tend to be the foreigner…in my group of friends … I’m the one with the funny accent… and although I’ve already been here for 15 years … my daughter is British, my ex-wife is British, most of my friends are British … I am the outsider, the foreigner and the stranger … I don’t know if there’s a connection to that and the feeling of being a stranger, even though I have always felt kind of welcome in this country and now, on top of that, after Brexit, I became a British citizen!”
‘Undergods’(2020) is an extremely confident and self-assured productions despite the complexities of the stories and the visuals. (see Latino Life Review: -https://www.latinolife.co.uk/articles/dystopia-gets-closer-home-film-‘undergods’-2020-–-directed-chino-moya). It is made up three separate tales, linked by thematic elements. The comfortable, if sterile existences of the characters are totally disrupted by the intrusion of a stranger into their lives. Outside, in a totalitarian and dystopian world, two surrealistic characters, K (Johann Meyers) and Z (Géza Röhrig), with the blackest humour, gather up dead bodies from the streets into their battered lorry and celebrate any live ones they find as they can sell them for food.
Hans (Eric Godon) in 'Undergods'
The soviet architectural style- inspired visuals in the film are mesmerizing, so that, despite the brutality of the stories, it is highly viewable and never lets up on the tension. The images have a distinct surrealistic feel and are reminiscent of some of the photography of Dora Maar, László Moholy- Nagy as well as the 1927 film ‘Metropolis’.
“The set designs were a combination of 3 different people. The ideas were initially in my head, then we scouted extensively around Eastern Europe to find the locations. We found really good locations [in Serbia and Estonia] but the problem is that they were normal streets… amazing communist buildings but they had cars, traffic lights, they had all sorts of stuff. We shot in those locations and then in post-production we removed the cars and lamp posts and traffic lights and everything and then we got an Estonian concept artist to design a city above those shots. We extended the buildings and added others. We broke everything down, we made everything look old and broken and [derelict], It was a long process.”
'Undergods' 2020
Moya openly admits he has been influenced by many directors, including the greats, like Tarkovsky, Pasolini, Fassbinder and Italian neo-realism with Vittorio de Sica, but also by lesser well-known films like ‘Possession’ by Andrzej Zulawski (with Isabella Adjani and Sam Neill) that was not a critical success when it was released, but has since become a cult classic.
True to a director who has previously worked with music videos, Moya’s choice of music for the production of ‘Undergods’ was very specific. The music marks the beats in the story, and with the sets, they become like characters in that they both form an integral part of the production.
“I was very inspired by German electronic music from the late 70s and early 80s so I decided to add this… as I knew it was the right soundtrack for ‘Undergods’. When I was writing the movie, I listened to it and I thought of that sense of bleakness and hopelessness. There are a lot of elements in that music that I found really interesting. It is very futuristic but sort of retro futuristic. I also used music from that period from a guy called WOJCIECH GOLCZEWSKI, who is a Polish film composer. He did a fantastic job. Later we also got a couple of other musicians, a Spanish guy called Gerardo Herrero and another English guy called Jeremy Warmsley.”
For more info www.chinomoya.com
Out of Here http://www.chinomoya.com/films/?zoombox=1 8: 35min film - short
‘Undergods’(2020) is coming to select cinemas, digital outlets and On Demand
from May 17th 2021
#UndergodsTheFilm
Credits
Writer/Director Chino Moya
Producer Sophie Venner
Cinematography David Raedeker
Editors Walter Fasano, Maya Maffioli, Tommaso Gallone
Production design Marketa Korinkova
Music Wojciech Golczewski
Main cast: Géza Röhrig, Johann Myers, Ned Dennehy, Michael Gould, Hayley Carmichael, Khalid Abdalla, Eric Godon, Jan Bijvoet, Tanya Reynolds, Tadhg Murphy, Sam Louwyck, Adrian Rawlins, Kate Dickie, Burn Gorman.
