Simón (2023)

Interesting facts

• Box office: $282.4K
• Budget: $35.8K
• Earned 7.9× its budget

Simón is a 2023 drama film written, directed, co-produced and edited by Venezuelan filmmaker Diego Vicentini. It is about a young Venezuelan protester, Simón, who, after being arrested and tortured during protests in his country, flees the country and seeks asylum in Miami, where he must decide whether to stay in the city or return to Venezuela. As filming took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, precautions were introduced, including frequent testing of the cast and crew, the strict use of masks and set sterilization between scenes, which added unforeseen costs to the production.

Production

The director, Diego Vicentini, produced a short film of the same name about the protests in Venezuela in 2017 as part of his thesis for his master's degree in film at the Los Angeles Film School. The short was released in 2018 in eight countries, and Vicentini decided to turn it into a feature film in the face of the unexpected positive reception.

The shooting of the feature film coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, which meant several logistical complications: the cast and crew were tested every three days, the use of masks was strict and the set was sterilized between scenes, representing additional and unforeseen costs for the production.

The prison setting was filmed in Redland, near Homestead, in southern Florida, where there is an abandoned city with deteriorating buildings. Actor Franklin Virgüez commented in an interview that he used the Stanislavski method to film the interrogation scene: when he moved from Barquisimeto to Caracas, he initially lived in a shanty house in Monte Piedad, on a hill where rats abounded and where he developed a phobia of them, so he imagined rats…

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