Psychedelic western musical hits Rio Cinema

Separado! An odyssey to a parallel universe...

Anyone who missed Gruff Rhys vs Tony da Gatorra at this year’s Field Day festival should definitely make their way to the Rio Cinema on Saturday 28 August for the late show – 11.30pm – of the documentary Separado!

Star Trek meets Buena Vista Social Club in this psychedelic western musical as Welsh pop legend Gruff Rhys (Super Furry Animals) takes us on a pan-continental road trip in search of his long lost Patagonian uncle, the poncho-wearing guitarist Rene Griffiths. Including an almost cosmic music battle, the film also stars Tony da Gatorra and his ‘gatorra’ – a mutant guitar, synth and drum machine.

When did you get the idea to make Separado!?

Separado! contains a story I’ve been hoping to tell for a long time. I was initially going to write a piece to accompany a photo story but it became apparent that it might be a story suited to music and film also. Every family seems to have a tall tale to tell, this is a story I grew up wondering whether it was true or not.

Did you always visualise it to be more than a documentary – a cross over between documentary and madder bits of re-enactment of history and time travelling?

I’m very suspicious of over-earnest storytelling. Hopefully teleportation helps underline the absurdity of the story itself and of existence in general. I wrote a storyboard for the whole film and tried to make it all happen in reality. It’s still a pretty straight-up documentary in parts.

How did seeing Rene Griffiths on the TV as a kid affect you, and when did you decide that time had come for you to go and try and track him down?

Rene is a very charismatic musician so it would be difficult for anyone not to be moved by his songs upon first hearing them. Any balladeer who arrives on stage on horseback needs further examination! It took me years to find a way of getting to Patagonia.

I eventually found myself mixing a record in Brazil and took a few weeks out at the end to head down there. We shot most of the film back in 2006. But it took 4 years to finish.

Any other reasons you decided to head to South America on this tour aside from tracking Rene Griffith down?

I had been touring and recording in South America as a musician for a number of years, which made the idea for the film plausible in the first place as I had already spent a bit of time over there. I had hoped to tour my songs in Patagonia for a long time. It’s a place I’ve been obsessed with for years. I’d read a pile of books about the place so it’s history became ingrained in my head!

The photograph of Dafydd Jones on horseback (your great-great grandfather’s brother, and Rene Griffith’s great grandfather) is amazing – were these photographs and stories always a part of you growing up, and did they always interest you, or did you only discover them recently?

My mother’s cousin, Beryl has kept the photos, she’s the custodian of the family tree – or forest as she prefers to call it. There was a photographer in the family who had documented a lot of the old characters. My favourite is a photo of my great great granddad John Jones. He has a gun in one hand and a rabbit in the other. He was a poacher and used to walk 30 miles a day.

How did you find processing the impressions, people and stories as you were travelling across South America?

We were trying to document as much as possible whilst we were there, be it through recording sounds and music and still photography, we were only there for a couple of weeks so it was a matter of document now and process later. I suppose we are still trying to make sense of it all today.

It’s one of the most draining experiences I’ve ever had, we were up at dawn every morning and carried on late into the night. Five of us travelled over a thousand kilometres in that blue van you see in the film. We saw the van on the street in Trelew, we left a note in the window asking if we could borrow it for two weeks. The owner phoned up within half an hour and gave us the van, he was called Mr Hughes and spoke a bit of Welsh.

How did you find out about the musician and TV repairman Tony da Gatorra, and how did you find the collaboration?

I had come across Tony’s music whilst working on an album in Brazil in 2006. A few months later a Glasgow-based festival called Trocabrahma were organizing collaborations between Brazilian and UK artists and asked if I would be interested in working with anyone. Next thing I knew we were recording a record together in Sao Paulo.

Gatorra feels that music is an international language and we understand each other through music. Would you say this is almost at the core of this film?

It’s certainly a key element of the film, we can have musical conversations with people from other cultures even if we don’t fully grasp everything about each other. Playing shows in Patagonia certainly felt like that, it was about sharing ideas of who we are, and in most cases people had the patience to listen and enjoy it even though I can’t really play guitar up to the average Argentinean or Brazilian standard, they could see what I was getting at!

We came across quite a selection of Welsh signs and names travelling with you across the countries. Any favourites?

The vibrant hand painted graphic signs in Patagonia were very inspiring and we included many stills of them throughout the film. There’s a hand-painted shop front in Trevelin called ‘Popeth yn iawn’ which means ‘Everything’s fine’ that was a particularly reassuring one. The graphics in the film were designed by Pete Fowler and were inspired in part by these signs.

What is your strongest memory from the tour?

Handing over a carrier bag containing my life savings in cash to an uninsured stunt man to fall off his horse is a particularly strong and painful memory.

Another is the destruction of our main camera on the second day of filming by the wing of an angry penguin. We were working to an extremely low budget so we shot the bulk of the film on two small digital cameras, so losing one was pretty traumatic, we left it on a tripod for 5 minutes to shoot some penguins and they ganged up on it!

The film is rather political, and touches not only on the oppression of the Welsh but also of the indigenous people of South America. Did you ever set out to make a political film?

One of the reasons we made the film was to readdress and re-examine the history of the Welsh colonisation of Patagonia. Obviously there is a very romantic element to the story and this has been covered to death by the Welsh media over the years. We wanted to learn more about the place beyond the Welsh community. So we wanted to learn about the environmental problems they face today, the legacy of the military regime and the nineteenth century genocide of the indigenous tribes at the hand of the Argentine army.

Any anecdotes that didn’t make it to the film that you would like to share?

How did you feel after playing your last gig at the Butch & Cassidy residence?

We did have a fuller examination of Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid’s history in Patagonia, it’s a fascinating tale in itself and we even had an animated segment involving the Wild Bunch gang’s robbery and murder of Llwyd Ap Iwan, the son of the founder of the Welsh colony. By this point though the film was three hours long and we felt it was a diversion to far from the plot in a film already full of diversions! It was a very painful scene to cut though! We’ll include it on the DVD.

Last question, is it really true that the Tehuelche tribe taught the Welsh to make windows out of ostrich feathers?

Yes, the Welsh had no resources to make glass when they first arrived. They had to live in temporary shelters and caves and survive on fox meat and ostrich. I see the film as a series of random observations by a delirious touring musician rather than an accurate anthropological study of Patagonian fauna and flora.

Separado! is showing at the Rio Cinema on Saturday 28 August at 11.30pm – late show, and on Tuesday 31 August at 11.30am, morning show.

For more info on the film visit Separado!