The Road to San Diego - Director´s comments

In the winter of 1952, when Eva Perón was on her deathbed in Buenos Aires, countless, popular demonstrations took place. Many people undertook extreme exploits, such as endless fasts, setting records for continuous work, and dance marathons; world records for gliders were broken, as well as records for walking backwards, sack carrying, etc. These things were all done by ordinary people who wished to contribute to saving Evita, participate somehow, and be close to her greatness and to eternity.

A few years ago, and attracted by these stories, I started working on one of them. It was the story of two lumber workers who decide to take an enormous timbo-tree trunk on their shoulders -on foot- from the jungle of Misiones Province to Buenos Aires. They were convinced that they would, thus, contribute to the recovery of their leader and protector. On the one hand, the story interested me as a manifestation of magical thinking that links cause and effect beyond rationality, but I was particularly attracted by the intangible ties that link myths and their followers. In this case, the link between Evita and those who perceive her as unreachable and at the same time as their equal, as somebody who knew how to attain glory in the name of everyone. I abandoned that script -like many others- but, when several years later, in March, 2004, Diego Armando Maradona was hospitalized due to a cardiac crisis at the Swiss-Argentine Hospital and the phenomenon of nearly religious devotion suddenly repeated itself, I revisited the story of the lumber workers, and updated it.

Now it is the story of "Tati" Benitez, a chain saw operator somehow less naive than his predecessors, the lumberjacks. For "Tati", meeting Diego Maradona, being close to him and maybe being able to have a picture taken with his idol is his most important wish. There is also in him, in a somewhat diffuse way, the suspicion that when he gets to know Maradona something in his life will change for the better. With these wishes he undertakes a trip.
"Tati" Benitez' journey along Route 14, through impoverished regions, is filled with both despair and hope.

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