EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Filmmaker Juan Pablo Di Pace Reflects On His Semi-Autobiographical Tale Of Young Love, ‘Duino’

Filmmaker Juan Pablo Di Pace discussed the meaning behind his new semi-autobiographical film Duino in his new uInterview.

Duino, which premiered at the LGBTQ Newfest film festival in New York City, follows an Argentinian filmmaker as he struggles to complete a film about his unrequited first love with a schoolmate. When he unexpectedly is offered the opportunity to reconstruct his memories, he revisits the past in the hope of finding a new ending to his story.

Di Pace, known for his roles in Fuller House and Momma Mia, gave some insight into his decision to step behind the camera for this movie to fulfill his childhood dream of directing:

“I’ve been in the kind of actor-performer seat for 23 years now, I think, but since childhood, I really wanted to direct,” di Pace told uInterview founder Erik Meers. “In fact, I did direct a lot of music videos and short films throughout the years. But I kept it kind of to the side, ‘One day, One  day, one day, I’ll make a feature.’ And my best friend Andrés Pepe Estrada, [we] met in middle school. We became really good friends because we connected over film and filmmaking. So, we taught ourselves how to edit. Through the years, he went on to become an amazing editor for films, and in 2020 this idea came to me to make a story, and I thought, ‘This is it; this is the film that we will make as our debut film, and we need to do it together.'”

The film muses on the nature of young love. “I think there’s a time in life around 16 to 18, maybe, where you’re definitely not a child anymore, and you’re not yet an adult, and it’s always like a window of time when you are very tender, right?” di Pace said. “I wanted to talk about that time, specifically, and how young adults feel things so much more. The bad things feel awful, and the good things feel amazing. And it’s a very specific time because you can’t really recreate that later on.”

The story, laden with detailed meta elements, re-examines the experience of “closing the loop,” as it were. Pace reflected on his own experience of closing out such a big project.

“When you’re making a film, it’s literally your baby,” he said. “It’s like a child, and you’re deciding everything about it, the colors, the actors, the story, how you want to tell a story, which take you use. And so to be so immersed in that has been quite intense. But what I’m trying to say is that there’s no bigger satisfaction to an artist than feeling like you said what you had to say in the way that you wanted to way it, and I feel that. And it’s rare, it’s rare to feel that you’ve put out into the world exactly what you wanted to put out as an artist. It’s not normal.”

Pace elaborated, “I felt it was the right thing to do because, ultimately, it’s about finding the voice too, and to do that, you need freedom. To find your own voice artistically, you need the freedom to make mistakes, to move, to go look at it this way, look at it this way until you find exactly how you want to say something.”