The Story of The Bare You - Documentary in Post Production
Every few years I naively get involved in a project I think will take a few months but ends up consuming years of my life. They aren’t bad projects, they are just difficult. A Reason To Sing, a musical I made after graduating from film school was supposed to take six months. It took three years. The Other, a stop motion music video I made for Saigo, was also supposed to take a few months. It took a year. The Bare You, a documentary about an acrobat from Lisbon, was supposed to take the last few months of 2019. It is now February, 2021 and I am in the middle of the second rendition of this impossible movie.
I met Natalia on Tinder in 2017. I was on a gig in Mexico, sitting in my room, bored and lonely. So I started swiping; an antidote to the symptom of deeper personal issues. Natalia’s profile appeared. She was obviously gorgeous, tremendously athletic, and intriguingly adventurous. I don’t usually match with perfect people like that but, to my surprise, “it’s a match!” popped onto my screen. I remember thinking it was a fake profile that would send me a link to some pornography site, but we started to talk and she explained that she was looking for people to climb with in Mexico. Wait, so she’s real? I looked at my schedule. Nope, not possible. Goddamn work-life UNbalance ruining my game! I sent a sad face and to my surprise our online conversation continued via whatsapp. I invited her to an annual climbing event called Scragg Fest in Yosemite later that year. I figured it was a nice gesture, but there was no way she would actually show up.
But she DID show up, and I didn’t. According to her, she walked into camp four in August and just randomly started asking people if they knew me. Eventually, she ran into one of my friends and spent the following week partying with the Scragglers. Meanwhile, I was working; filming naked dying people in the jungle while my friends were meeting the beautiful nomadic European I was convinced was the love of my life I would never meet.
To my surprise, a year later, Natalia returned to Scragg! Apparently, Yosemite and the Scragglers had made a good impression on her! This time she had a boyfriend: Gunnar, a Berliner tech wizard and talented light painter. Yet again, I was working instead of Scragging and spent that week spinning nobs and pushing buttons on a camera while lamenting missing the best event of the year. When I got home my best friend Roland recounted the event for me and how amazing Gunnar was. “Good. I’m glad she found someone amazing” I said, secretly swallowing my resentment.
6 months later, while shooting more naked idiots in Ecuador, I got a whatsapp message from Natalia. She told me she was going to shoot a nude photo with a homeless guy named Dean Fidelman. To be fair, he’s a Stonemaster (a group of climbing legends from the 60s and 70s) and brilliant photographer. She wanted to know if I would like to document it. Hmmm…that’s different. I wanted to meet Natalia, Dean, and even Gunnar, but it sounded like a very loose idea with no story arc. Usually, I would turn something like that down, but the prospect of being in the presence of such impressive people during a unique project for no money was too strange to pass up.
In August, I landed in LA post-redeye flight at 10am after two hard months in the jungles of Ecuador. I opened my bags, exchanged my jungle kit with my climbing gear, and answered a million emails about my next gig happening in ten days. I didn’t want to drive to Yosemite. I wanted to relax instead of working before work. Plus, Natalia wasn’t answering my texts about the shooting schedule. Nevertheless, my gut told me to go. Cursing my stupid intestines, I threw everything in my car and got on the I-5 North, somehow instinctively knowing there was something worthwhile at the end of Yosemite tunnel. Through multiple cups of coffee and a few naps, I arrived safely in the most beautiful tourist-packed valley in the world at 8:30am.
I wandered around Yosemite lodge, following vague directions, looking for a couple Europeans and a climbing legend. I pushed through a tree and saw them lounging in a hammock. Nobody looked inspired to work. Classic story: People want a finished film about themselves but don’t want to commit to the work required to MAKE a film. Well, I’m here. Might as well make the best of it. I sat down and introduced myself before immediately bumming too many cigarettes from Dean. I felt better that Natalia was nervously doing the same. Over the next few hours I got to know the crew: Natalia, Gunnar, Dean, and Natalia’s friend Aza and his girlfriend. I don’t think I’ve ever been in the presence of so many brilliant high functioning people. The conversation was consistently over my head as we debated technology, politics, and the state of the world.
Over the next two days we buckled down and were surprisingly productive, Gunnar and Aza wielding their cameras as well. I wasn’t sure exactly what we had recorded when I left but I knew it looked good. We had captured Natalia driving into the valley, her preparation, her and Dean together, her stripping nude and performing on the silks for Dean’s lens, and and a very interesting interview. It was clear that Natalia did not take her decision to pose nude lightly and our two hour on-camera conversation was unified by themes of growth through discomfort, body positivity, and feminist theory that I was kicking myself for not doing more research on. I was more inspired than I had been in years. I wished I could start editing immediately, but instead, I went back to work, this time shooting a show about cowboys searching for dinosaurs. My job is weird.
Five months later, in January 2020, I had a rough cut. I sent it to Natalia and Gunnar in Germany and decided it was best to book a flight and start fine cutting face to face. I arrived in early March to a gloomy winter Berlin. The plan was to work on the doc for a week, then explore the city with Sarah, my girlfriend at the time, then go to France and climb. A week went by and we debated endlessly, mostly about feminist theory. We were determined to crack the code of how Natalia’s performance was a valid feminist expression. Once we solved one issue it seemed like ten more would reveal themselves.
When Sarah arrived a week later she was upset. Something about a statement the WHO had made about this virus being a world threat? I figured it was fine. People overreact to this kind of thing all the time, right? Ebola, SARS, whether or not salt is bad for you. Then our flight was cancelled…ok. I sat down with her and we looked at all the available flights back to LA. They were all priced over $2000 while the following week’s flights were only $1. Maybe this is more serious than I thought! Sarah and I booked the cheapest flight we could find and ran back home. I’d still be in Berlin if it wasn’t for her.
Once back in LA, the conversation about the project continued with Natalia, along with Sarah’s well-educated help. Feminism. It is such a dense subject fraught with incongruent theories and thousands of years of unconscious bias. The main problem is that Natalia’s performance was filmed in slow motion during sunset. I had unknowingly copied a film grammar used in every movie that objectified females. On one hand it was aesthetically pleasing and arousingly beautiful. On the other hand, it could be argued that Natalia was positioning herself as a product for consumption, victim to what Laura Mulvey calls “The Male Gaze”. After a week long conversation, I decided we should start recording our process. It was at least interesting to me. Over the next month, Gunnar shot me interviewing Natalia via whatsapp resulting in 9 hours of wandering conversation! By the end we were pretty sure that we had all come to a fuller understanding of ourselves and would be able to save a little money on therapy over the coming months. We were less convinced we had come out with anything worthy of being included in our project.
I started editing and quickly realized one thing was clear. Natalia was experiencing an identity crisis and this story was about that, not a feminist expression. Natalia went to Yosemite to photograph and film with two men she had never met because she was trying to come to terms with her own existence. I think it would be too easy to write off her autonomous expression as superficial, like buying a sports car during a mid-life crisis, but I’m convinced Natalia was sensing something deeper within herself that called her to eccentric action. She purposely put herself into an uncomfortable situation for an hour for Dean and for 9 hours during my interview. Something about that was worthy of attention and the months I have spent sifting through terabytes of footage.
Again, I had to go back to work and had to set the project aside. When I returned in November 2020, I was undergoing an identity crisis of my own and began to identify with Natalia’s internal conflict. Every day I spend with the footage is a lesson for me as I digest the significance of utilizing one’s own passions to generate as honest an expression as possible. In Yosemite in August 2019, a helix of burning passions wound together, manifesting into the stunning pictures you see above. This was born out of Natalia’s instinct that something was unfulfilled in her life as an entertainer, something I can relate to and I think something that many people experience in their own careers.
The seemingly endless time invested in these kinds of projects is not a waste. On the contrary, the reason these projects take a long time to complete is because they are challenging, and challenging projects are the ones that inspire personal and professional growth . Every day I spend on this project teaches me how to be a more well rounded person and a better filmmaker. Thank you to Natalia Cerqueira for tricking me into documenting her journey. It has been an unforgettable experience and this project promises to be something worthwhile; something that ads to the conversation about self-empowerment, identity crisis, and the taboos that we navigate daily for better or worse.