“Sometimes someone tells you they have a dream. For so long I’ve dreamed of making a film that isn’t there.”“A film?” I asked. “Yes, a film I’ve always dreamed of . . . about Yuri. Yuri Ahronovitch, the conductor.” I started making that film, and my thoughts took me back in time, to when I was a child and then little more than a child. My father died when I was eight and as I grew up I realized I knew very little about this lost parent, and that solitude shadowed my days, months, and hours. When I was about thirteen or fourteen, I began my first search. I went looking for his friends, acquaintances or anyone with whom he had had contact. Slowly, I pocketed pieces of a puzzle found here and there, and gradually those pieces of anecdotes, recollections or comments began to take shape, outlining a story whose contours became more solid, bringing to light a physiognomy of smiles and difficulties, defeat and hope, soil-ingrained, calloused hands closed in a fist, and red carnations, seeking a way to achieve a dignity desired and pursued. As the days passed and the investigation into my father progressed, it took on increasingly bold traits and distinctive outlines.Well, I started shooting the film about Yuri Ahronovitch with no script prepared, as would normally be the case, but with the idea of tracing chapter and verse of the life of this man, this artist, delving into the innermost recesses, of what was public and what was not.