You don’t forget Eugenio Caballero’s production designs. There’s the otherworldly Pan’s Labyrinth, for which he won an Academy Award. There’s the black-and-white Mexico City in Roma, for which he was nominated for another Oscar. And his most recent efforts in director Alejandro Iñárritu’s Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths will be screened at this year’s Virginia Film Festival.
Caballero will also be presented with the film fest’s first Craft Award, which recognizes a distinguished and outstanding practitioner of behind-the-scenes craft.
A production designer is “the artist hired to create everything you see in the environment that the actors inhabit on screen,” explains film critic Carlos Aguilar, who writes for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Wrap, and who is the festival’s first critic-in-residence.
“I think [Caballero] is an incredible artist with a talent for creating worlds that either existed in the past or that are sort of fantastical,” says Aguilar.
Caballero has worked with Mexico’s three most renowned directors: Guillermo Del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, and Iñárritu.
Aguilar’s review of Bardo for The Wrap describes Caballero as “a magician dexterous at turning places long frozen in the directors’ unreliable memory tangible once more for the screen.”
Says Aguilar, “In Roma, he basically brought to life the Mexico City of the ’70s and Alfonso Cuarón’s childhood home.” In Pan’s Labyrinth, “he built the magical world Guillermo had envisioned that is really striking.”
Pan’s Labyrinth had “very strict rules with colors and shapes,” says Caballero in a podcast called Decorating Pages. The filmmaker chose a cold palette for the reality of Franco’s Spain, and a warm palette for the fantasy “that’s supposed to be scary, but at the end it’s a refuge or shelter for this girl,” he says. The furniture was built to be a little bigger. “We really wanted to change the scale.”
Aguilar notes Caballero’s “incredible attention to detail in painstakingly bringing to life these worlds. In Roma, making it seem organic and natural, not artificial, is part of the magic he does.”