Sofia Bilbao Bardier at the 2024 Red Film Festival in Reims, France, where her film “Mabel” earned a Best Feature nomination (from the artist)
Shot in Lawrence, Kansas, her “Mabel,” a tale of murder, dark rites and thwarted relationships, received 20 film awards
“I considered myself a filmmaker when I came here,” says Sofia Bilbao Bardier, “but now I consider myself a storyteller because I grab things from different ways of telling the story. The most powerful thing about immersive storytelling is the imagination. That is the most powerful thing.”
The Uruguay-born Bardier, following up her bachelor’s degree at Catholic University of Uruguay, applied for study at the University of Kansas through ISEP (International Study Exchange Program), where she earned a bachelor’s degree in filmmaking. “The cool thing about KU,” she says, “is it made me proud to have been accepted. The professors there are really nice in my program, really tight together. They’ve allowed me to do the things I wanted to do.”
While at KU, Bardier says she was drawn to immersive storytelling after falling in love with theater and thinking of how she could connect both film and theater. “I was in love with storytelling since I was a child,” she says. “My father, who was in the navy, used to tell me stories. In my mind, that was amazing. That’s one of the things that I envy about books and (that) as a filmmaker it is so complicated to do, because of the imagination.”
In March of this year, Bilbao directed an immersive theatrical and filmmaking project based on writer Kyle Smith’s “Paralysis,” which utilized the confines of Murphy Hall’s Inge Theater to evoke the emotional despair of the main character. The collaborative effort permitted Bardier to expound on the emotional push-and-shove of Smith’s characters: the distraught Joy, the helping friend, Lilly, and the paralyzing Angler.
For the production, Bardier used mirrors, video and the unearthly music of Uruguayan band Ivana Rodriguez y los Imaginarios. When not answering the alternating voices, Joy, veering from self-questioning to immobility, listens to Rodriguez’s dreamlike “Afuera” on repeat. “I know a lot of musicians in Uruguay and every time I do a movie, I call on them,” she says. “There is a lot of really good music there.”
Rodriguez’s music also appeared in Bardier’s capstone project, “Mabel,” a two-plus-hour tale of murder, dark rites and thwarted relationships in a town that’s only placid on the surface. I remember the professors were doubting everything (because of the length),” she says of the heady months between completing and editing the film and submitting it to contests. The production took six months, shot on weekends around cast and crew class schedules, and was completed in 2023.
The film, which Bardier adapted from a serialized story she wrote in Uruguay during COVID lockdown, received 20 film awards and earned a Best Feature nomination at the Red Film Festival in 2024, held in Reims, France. “It was crazy,” she says, “being nominated alongside people who have been in the industry for a number of years.”
Bardier says she stays in touch with the filmmakers she met in Reims with the hope that some might be potential collaborators. “We don’t have a lot of films from Uruguay,” she says of the country’s film scene, which she describes as lagging behind neighboring Argentina. “People say you have to go away and know the world to be a filmmaker, but there are some (who criticize the same thing). Being commercial gets a bad rap.”
So far, making films in the Midwest continues to inspire her filmmaking spirit of adventure. “To film ‘Mabel’ we needed a lot of nature and abandoned places. I remember we traveled between 30 minutes to three hours to find places to film. I’m so grateful for the families of the crew that let us use the horses, and also the family in Lawrence that let us use their house to film inside.”
She added, “What I like about the Kansas environment is that it is so diverse that we found different weathers around the state. We needed accessibility and affordability, and Kansas and Missouri were the best places to do it.”
The filmmaker, who begins her master’s degree in UMKC’s Immersive and Digital Media Design program this fall, is keeping busy. “I have three shorts. One of them is sci-fi. (One of them is) aliens. The other one is more like sci-fi mixed with ‘X-Men.’”
In addition to three short films lined up, Bardier just completed shooting a ten-minute short called “El Individuo,” which “explores the weight of routine and the mental stagnation it can create. The film asks: What happens when we’re so trapped in repetition that a part of us splits off? When the obsession becomes so strong it manifests into something — or someone — outside of ourselves? Who is real then?”
Not surprisingly, Bardier, whose favorite films include the original “Saw,” is considering horror festivals.
Recalling the days of the “Mabel” shoot, she says, “At first a lot of people didn’t believe in us and thought we were crazy. There were a lot of times I wanted to give up, but I kept going because as my dad always said, the only person that you need to convince is yourself, and then the rest comes after.”
