Meet Alison Murray | Screenwriter / Director / Producer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Alison Murray and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Alison, what do you attribute your success to?
I guess my stubbornness has been a factor in my “success” – when I am passionate about a project I just keep pushing away at it, I keep honing the creative process, I keep knocking on doors and I I never give up. With my new movie, ARIEL BACK TO BUENOS AIRES, I wrote the first draft of the script in 2014. From there is took five years to raise the financing, we hoped to start production in early 2019, this got pushed to early 2020. Then we had the pandemic which but the brakes on for 18 months, but I never gave up until we were able to resume production in a new country, with new locations and many new cast members. The film was finally complete at the end of last year and has been winning prizes on the festival circuit since then.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I am very excited to share my new movie ARIEL BACK TO BUENOS AIRES with the world. The movie tells the story of a brother and sister who return to Argentina, country of their birth, for the first time as adults. There they fall in love with a glamorous nocturnal world of tango bars and clubs, and discover dark secrets about their family’s emigration.

I am passionate about filming dance, and this project had the unique challenge of many scenes of tango. I hope that the elements of dance and music in the movie will make the darker element of the story which relates to the military dictatorship in Argentina, easier to handle.

Having taken some time away from the film industry to become a mother , I found it challenging to ‘come back’ and discover that women are no longer seen as an equity-seeking group by many in the industry. Yet statistically, women remain terribly underrepresented in key roles in the biggest movies.

I would like people who enjoy dance and a moving story to look for ARIEL BACK TO BUENOS AIRES after its streaming release in the U.S. September 12 , 2023.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Let’s go together to Buenos Aires. Let’s first get some fresh air after a long flight with a walk through the little known btut easy to access Nature Reserve along the coast of the River Plate. Let’s go have some grass-fed free range meat at cooked over an open flame at San Telmo’s Parrilla La Brigada. Not forgetting the Morcilla ( blood pudding ) , Mollejas ( sweetbreads ) and Chinchulines ( small intensines ) . Then on to a fashionable ‘milonga’ – social gathering where people dance improvised tango such as Tango Bar milonga in the Zorzal centro cultural. In the early hours of the morning we can go for cafe and medialunas ( argentinean croissants ) . If it is Sunday we can check out the amazing street market in San Telmo ( my favourite historic neighbourhood ) for antiques and artesanal crafts. At the end of the day we can follow the Candombe drummers and dancers winding through the cobbled streets, the rhythms ricocheting off the facades of old tenements and reverberating through packed crowds. The lyrics of old tangos and milongas speak with nostalgia of Buenos Aires’ African legacy, yet the spirit of candombe has not been lost in the past. After getting some food on the fabulous Avenida Caseros by Lezama Park ( vegetarians will love Hierba Buena ) we should go hear some live tango music – Singers Eliana Sosa, Juan Villarreal or Ariel Varnerin for example, all of whom feature in my movie ARIEL BACK TO BUENOS AIRES.

The word candombe was first written down in the 18th century to describe the mix of music, dance and a fusion of Bantu and Catholic religion developed by Angolan and Congolese slaves in Spain’s Río de la Plata territories – now Argentina and Uruguay. After an independent Argentina abolished slavery in 1853, African communities gathered in nations in the neighbourhoods of Monserrat and San Telmo, where they continued to practice a tradition that became a pivotal influence on the development of the city’s native tango. Candombe and Afro-Argentine traditions in general fell in and out of favour during different political regimes, but the legacy lives on.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I would dedicate my shoutout to my Argentinean producing partners, Felicitas Raffo and Pamela Livia, without whom this complex international film coproduction would never have succeeded. Felicitas and Pamela are world class producers through their company, Cepa Cine. I have never felt so supported in my creative endeavours as I did on this production. And they steered the project through the stormy waters of the Covid 19 pandemic, finding a way for us to resume production by moving to Montevideo, Uruguay to continue shooting. I would also mention Canadian author Naomi Klein, whose book The Shock Doctrine I read many years ago, which was my first introduction to the intersection of capitalism on steroids and U.S. foreign policy which led to the. devastating military dictatorship in Argentina. And also my dear friend artist Laura Taler, who is the person who first introduced me to tango.

Website: www.arieltangomovie.com, www.thehellhound.com

Instagram: Arieltangomovie

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/arieltangomovie1

Youtube: https://youtu.be/Ws5915zE12E

Other: IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11790268/?ref_=tt_urv