During the process of shooting the short film I Love You So Much I Wrote a Movie to Never Get Upset with You, Alba Cravero realized he was transgender. That realization was not to be ignored: Cravero – who has since transitioned from female to male – knew then and there that he needed to start the process to become his true self.

“It was a random moment during Christmas,” he says of the realization and mentions that he was reading Jorge Luis Borges’ “El Martin Fierro”, “when the word trans appeared in his mind. “It had nothing to do with the reading and I tried to focus on what I was doing, but my mind would not let it go, and I started rethinking my life and saw signs everywhere that this was who I really was. It became very clear.”

However, the script he had written was for a woman who still identified as a woman – indeed, a woman named Alba like himself (he has decided to keep the name). He wanted to be true to this script, so he stayed true to the character during the shooting of the film, in which he plays the leading character, Alba, who is on a trip with her friends when she learns that another friend has died. She is heartbroken.

“They are somewhere in a remote part of the country and she cannot get to her friend’s funeral,” he now explains about the plot. “This film became more relatable to me when I finished writing the script during Covid. I felt the isolation and the fact that nobody could  go anywhere at all. That is what Alba feels like in the film.”

In the film it is New Year’s Day and there are no means of transportation to take her away from where she is, so she is forced to stay with her close friends Valentin, Cande and Simon, who are all queer, and who do not seem to be too affected by her loss.

“This is my reality,” Cravera says of making a film about the queer world. “This is not some premeditated idea: ‘I want to make a story about queers.’ It is our story and that is why it is so natural for us to tell you about it.”

Alba Cravera is 24 years old. He went to film school at Universidad Nacional de Córdoba and I Love You So Much I Wrote a Movie to Never Get Upset with You was his final project. The film was accepted at the Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente (BAFICI) and premiered here Sunday April 23rd.

“It was actually quite easy,” he says about co-directing the film with Rosario González Leániz and playing the leading character at the same time. “We prepared everything together before the shoot and then I could focus on acting while Rosario directed the crew while we were on set. It felt very natural to me.”

In the film, Cravera plays opposite Belén Costamagna, Miguel Ágel Simmons and Pablo Huespe. He enjoyed seeing the audience’s reaction to his film.

“It is a great feeling that I can now share the film with others and that it is no longer just ours,” says Cravera, whose film was produced by Valentin Ledesma Farabelli. “It was such a great surprise to be part of the festival and it was such an honor.”

He is now ready with a new script to a film called Lucia, which is a film about someone who is going blind and is fully aware of when it will happen.

“It is about how your perception of the world changes, when you are losing something in relation to you body,” he concludes.