At VLAFF, Edgardo Moreno's The Firefly Project grapples with living between the Chile of memory and present-day Canada
Multimedia storytelling meets live performance and film screening
Edgardo Moreno
The Vancouver Latin American Film Festival presents Edgardo Moreno’s Firefly Project at the Cinematheque on September 10
EDGARDO MORENO’S upcoming Vancouver Latin American Film Festival appearance is billed as a “live multimedia storytelling performance”, and three-quarters of that description is absolutely straightforward. Moreno, a multi-instrumentalist who switches easily from electric guitar to ukulele to Latin American folk instruments, has a long history of collaborating with choreographers and filmmakers, and will be on-stage, providing a live soundtrack as his own film works are screened.
But what’s the “storytelling” component?
A quick internet search turns up a number of short clips of earlier pieces, some of which feature text, and some of which do not. With Moreno’s new Firefly Project, however, the storytelling is being pushed to the fore, and the Chilean-Canadian artist has an easy and effective way of explaining what’s up.
“Do you want to hear a story?” he asks, on the line from his home in Hamilton, Ontario. “I’ll tell you one, which is one of the stories I tell in the performance—and then I follow it up with a video that kind of supports that story in a kind of abstract way.
“My parents moved back to Chile,” Moreno continues, having already established that his parents were political refugees from Chile’s brutal military coup of 1973, and that they had emigrated to Toronto when he was just 10. “And so they were walking down a street in Santiago after maybe 30 years, because they had already been back for a few years, and they saw a blind guy trying to cross the street at a busy intersection. They walked past him, ’cause they weren’t crossing, but then my dad decided to go back and help him across the street while my mom waited. My mom said ‘Oh, I just saw that they started talking, and I didn’t know why they took so long.’ And my dad said that as he was helping him cross the street the man said ‘Oh, thank you. You’re very kind. What’s your name?’ My dad said ‘My name is Moreno.’ He just said his last name, and the man said ‘Oh, I knew a Moreno, but he moved to Canada 30 years ago.’
“It turns out that they had gone to high school together, and the guy had gone blind later. So they sat there and talked for I don’t know how long.”
The message is that while you can go home again, even after a long exile, things will have inevitably changed.
The Firefly Project, as Moreno explains, is his way of coming to terms with living in two places at once: a remembered Chile, which his parents were helping to turn into a worker’s paradise before the CIA-engineered coup that toppled the democratically elected Salvador Allende, and modern-day Canada. This bifurcated life has not been without stresses.
“For my parents, Chile was a perfect place,” Moreno says. “And when I was older my dad and I had a lot of disagreements, but always in a friendly way. We’d say ‘Yeah, yeah, Chile is amazing. It’s the best. It’s even got the best torturers, and the best. murderers.’ He would just laugh.
“If you watch the film,” he continues, “there’s a section where it says ‘My parents came, and their suitcases were full of ghosts, and I was drowning in this crowded space that my parents had created for us.’ So it’s about me trying to NOT have this incredibly nostalgic longing for this place. It was about me exorcizing those ghosts.”
Some hauntings, Moreno admits, he will carry forever, although he’s found ways of putting them to work. In his teens and 20s, he explains, he became fascinated with Latin American folk music, and learned to play a variety of Indigenous instruments in the traditional way. Today, though, he applies classical-guitar technique, amplification, and electronics to those sounds as a way of hinting at his past while sidestepping nostalgic veneration. Similarly, in the Firefly Project as well as earlier works such as Geography of Nowhere, he use footage of both Canada and Chile, but often the images are blurred or morphed, in homage to the inevitable distortions of memory. This blurred, atmospheric approach is surprisingly effective, despite Moreno’s self-effacing attitude towards his visuals.
“I don’t consider myself a filmmaker. I just throw things together,” he says, claiming that he only “dabbles” with film as part of his audio projects. But the evidence is clear: Moreno is a filmmaker as well as a musician and storyteller, and his work speaks beautifully to the immigrant experience that is so much a part of what Canada is today.
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