The email landed at 2 a.m. Carlos Vargas was in an Airbnb, mid-move from Berlin to Mozambique, jet-lagged across the time difference, and he grabbed his phone half-asleep to find an acceptance from the Tribeca Film Festival. He read it several times before he believed it. Then he woke his wife. He didn’t care what hour it was. It took him a month and a few long swims to digest. He hadn’t really been aiming at Tribeca at all. He’d been sending the film around, saw De Niro’s festival was an option, remembered he was about to be near New York, and thought, why not.
That’s the whole spirit of Hidden Era: aim small, stay loose, see what opens.
A Painter Who Looked Like Basquiat
Vargas didn’t start with a script. He started with a person. He’d come back from Tribeca in 2023, where he shot and produced Melody of Love. The New Yorkers had told him his cinematography was strong, that his stories mattered, that he should believe it. He’d spent years shooting shorts, documentaries, and television. The only thing he actually wanted to make was cinema. Something always pulled him off course. So when he got to Maputo, he went straight at it.
In the city he met a Rastafari artist who reminded him a little of Jean-Michel Basquiat. They spent a day together, found they’d dressed in the same colors, and the connection was instant. One of the man’s paintings stopped him cold: a figure tending goats. It threw Vargas straight back to his father, who’d grown up in the Colombian countryside. “We felt the connection. It was like an explosion.” He told the artist he wanted to make something with him, but for a long time he didn’t say the word “movie.” He just kept showing up.
The Women Who Took Over the Movie
That artist became Phambi, played by Isaac Tivane, the center of Hidden Era: a painter struggling to keep his son Ixon in school, whose portrait of a feminist named Paula turns into a symbol of activism in the community. Vargas was wary of building a film only about a man, about pride and sales and ego. So he wrote in the women, Paula and Ednora. They nearly took the film over. “For me, my next movie is this movie,” he says of them. “These girls are amazing.” The desire line stayed simple on purpose: a father needs money to keep his kid in school. If you’re a parent, you’re on board in one sentence.
The Spare Film
When Marcus reaches for a comparison, he lands on Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse, released in English as The Beautiful Troublemaker, the four-hour 1991 film about an aging painter and the model who unsettles him. It rhymes with a story built around a painter and his muse. Vargas hears it, but his own touchstone is simpler and harder: Taxi Driver. Hidden Era follows Phambi through the city the way Scorsese follows Travis Bickle, one man’s point of view pressed against a whole place, the camera close and unglamorous.
That instinct for the spare runs through how he prepares. Before shooting, he and his team watched more than a hundred films in a month, Asian, Iranian, European, American, and read books and poetry, trying to “levitate” into the right state to create. He keeps a line from Walt Whitman close: “In order to connect with the people, you just really have to go inside of yourself.” Strip away the machinery, and what’s left is the thing he trusts. A good film, in his view, is usually the spare one.
A Crew of Almost Nobody
The production matched the philosophy. Vargas financed Hidden Era himself, pouring in the salary from his communication-agency work. The first priority for that money was paying the actors fairly.
If you’re going to establish a relationship with these very beautiful people, you have to make sure the relationship is fair.
Most of the budget went to the cast. The rest went to gasoline, because Vargas drove the car himself. He shot it. He edited it. The crew was a handful of friends and locals: a sound designer who built the whole mix from the few microphones Vargas set on location, a production assistant named Katia, a second-unit camera hand here and there. Nothing like a classical film crew.
He’s worked the other way too, on big German productions. Thirty-plus people stand by waiting to enter action, and the whole thing runs like a machine. He admires that precision. But he’s clear about the trade: managing a crew that size eats time, and the catering budget alone could fund a micro-budget feature. Keeping it small kept it intimate, which is what shooting in a real place with real people demands. Some scenes, he simply left the camera running and stepped out of the room so nobody felt the pressure of his presence, then went hunting in the footage for the moments of silence.
It helped that Phambi doesn’t drink. In past productions, Vargas says, the work bled into long nights of drinks with the artists and actors. Here the focus held, partly because there was no party to drift into. The set ran on a different kind of energy, built on trust rather than logistics.
Why Not to Make It Your Profession
Vargas has a counterintuitive piece of advice for anyone aiming at this life: try not to make filmmaking your profession. Not because you shouldn’t do it, but because he’s seen what the pressure does. People sell the house. They take on heavy credit. They buy the expensive cameras and turn a joy into a debt. Marcus knows that road. He admits he’s climbed out of that kind of debt himself and is strangely proud of having survived it, like finishing boot camp. Vargas would rather protect the pleasure. After two films he wants to make a third, and he wants it to be easier and happier than the last, not harder.
He’s honest about how brutal the in-between can feel. Marcus mentions getting turned down just the day before by a company he thought would take his latest documentary, and the discouragement that comes with it. Vargas keeps his guard against false hope too, especially about distribution. He calls it anything but easy, full of crazy deals and the constant need to find the right person to champion the work. The film is registered as a German and Colombian production, drawing institutional support from both. Back in Colombia it carries a particular pride. As far as Vargas knows, it’s the first time a Colombian director has shot a fiction feature in Africa.
What he holds onto is the philosophy he keeps returning to, the one that doubles as the episode’s title.
We don’t want to suffer in the process. We just want to make it as free as we can.
A Punch to the World
Vargas keeps coming back to the people who’ll travel with the film. The Mozambican artists, Phambi among them, will fly to New York to stand at the premiere of a movie shot in their own city. For a film made by a handful of friends with a car and a few microphones, that’s the whole reward. He calls it, plainly, a punch to the world. The full conversation is looser and funnier than a summary can show, and the way Vargas and Marcus trade war stories about debt and distribution is worth the listen on its own.
