Meditative and loving report of several hours from the life of Juan Carlos Godoy, a legend in Argentine tango singing. The maestro is in his late 80s, but still very active. Inevitably also an ode to Buenos Aires, by the maker of the beautiful The Great Post Road.
'This is going to be a quiet film, isn’t it?’ Juan Carlos Godoy asks at the beginning of Hoy como ayer. The camera has been on him for nearly 10 minutes, and so far not a word has been spoken. Bernie IJdis calmly follows the 87-year-old tango singer while he prepares for a gig in a bar in his home city of Buenos Aires, as he does virtually every day.
When Godoy has taken his place at the microphone, it becomes clear just how much he still remains a master of the art of singing. With great conviction, he presents tangos he has probably already sung a thousand times.
After his previous films Jalan Raya Pos (The Great Post Road) and Riviera Hotel, IJdis was eager to make a film without financial backing and without the lengthy wait this always entailed. Hoy como ayer was put together and shot in a very brief period, in total freedom. The result is an authentic, loving and delicate portrait of the old maestro, Godoy - and of his city of Buenos Aires, where the tango is still a flourishing art form.
Programmer Note by Gerwin Tamsma:
The bar De Witte Aap in the Witte de Withstraat in Rotterdam may have been voted the best bar in the world last year by Lonely Planet readers, but that’s probably because they don’t know El Bandarin in Buenos Aires. This bar lies, well hidden, behind the almost endless early 20th-century blocks of houses in Buenos Aires where decay, empty homes and neglect, mixed with restoration and the occasional new building, rapidly help casual tourists lose their bearings. Abasto is the area tango legend Carlos Gardel grew up in.
A few hundred metres from El Bandarin lies El mercado de Abasto, a gigantic, Art Deco market hall which dates back to the 1930s and is now a shopping centre and home to a 12-screen cinema complex. This is the principal screening place for the independent BAFICI film festival, inextricably tied to the careers of many Argentinean directors such as Martin Rejtman, Pablo Trapero or Lisandro Alonso.
During BAFICI, the IFFR and Binger sometimes organise drinks at El Bandarin for their Argentine contacts. Last year, Ilse Hughan, Lisandro Alonso’s producer and a member of the Hubert Bals Fund committee, organised a short performance by one of the few surviving tango masters, 88-year-old Juan Carlos Godoy. At first sight a fragile old man - which perhaps he is - yet his voice is still strong and his mind unbroken. It was a brief but memorable show, in the world’s most beautiful bar, which is located on an anonymous street corner.
This is why Dutch documentary filmmaker Bernie IJdis, aided by a young, local production crew, has immortalised this monument in that unique city. In a charming manner, Hoy como ayer gives a mildly hypnotising sensation of actually being in Buenos Aires, and even briefly being in El Bandarin.
At the time of writing, it appears that Juan Carlos Godoy will be attending the film’s world premiere in Rotterdam. Naturally, he will also perform. Do yourself a favour and attend: it will be unforgettable.