Virginia García del Pino: “There is no need to kill, die or suffer so much for love”

Time of History section has received this Monday the world premiere of La estafa del amor, by Virginia García del Pino, a film arising from the real case known in 2018 of one of many love swindlers, different in that he “showed his face and gave interviews”. She even went so far as to start shooting the documentary about that character with a script to use. “By the third week I got tired,” confessed the director to explain the change of direction of a work already in progress.

Following an invitation from the Cineteca de Madrid to give a workshop, Virginia García del Pino proposed “a kind of congress on love”. Among the numerous attendees, she made a representative selection of different profiles of age, gender, professions… and began a filming in which she could directly check the reaction of the audience live, also with live music, “all very funny”. The various personal testimonies are interspersed in the film with more academic contributions from a philosopher, an anthropologist, a sociologist or a writer on romantic love.

The result questions the idealization of the feeling of love and myths such as that of the better half, while sending the message that “there is no need to kill, die or suffer so much for love”, but simply to enjoy it, concluded the Catalan filmmaker.