In collaboration with the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Gabriel Herrera Torres' How To Reach God Through Proper Exercising (2017) is showing exclusively on MUBI from July 3 - August 2, 2017 as part of the series Competing at Oberhausen.
We tried to create a story where dreams, vanity, and male beauty play a founding part of a social structure, as a quiet “exchange currency” that shapes the ever changing and unpredictable figure charted by people's affairs.
The film tries to be a minimal, self-contained comedy of manners, playing naive and irresponsibly (one expects), with the conflicting definitions of the inner and the outer being. A moral conundrum on the practical contradictions of seeing one’s self as exterior and opposed to the Other, to any “other,” and the comical, inherent dangers of identifying too easily with the idea of one's self.
Like an episode of Goofy in the Olympics as filmed by Robert Bresson, we hope to help in creating a series of new, nonsensical moral dilemmas— advocating empathy for daily objects as beings with a dignity of their own— while at the same time making a small love letter to male beauty, suggesting that a gym could be the place where the Supernatural may still prevail, and true loneliness could be confronted and dealt with through superhuman strength.
All of this, with no other intention but that of awakening what is genuine, ethical and necessary in the beautifully irrational fear of the Gods.