We recently caught up with alumna Marina Xarri (CFS Class of 2018), a writer-director whose short film Habitat Hotel just premiered at the San Sebastián International Film Festival. Marina first met many of her closest collaborators at Central Film School - including producer Asya Segalovich, who recently appeared on our blog for her Cannes success. Now, as Marina celebrates a major milestone in her filmmaking journey, she reflects on her time at CFS, the creative community that shaped her path, and the collective approach to storytelling she continues to build today.
Tell ua a bit about your experience studying at Central Film School and how it helped prepare you for the industry.
I think Central Film School prepares you for the industry by making you wear a lot of hats during your time there. You end up learning how every part of a film works, even the areas you didn’t expect to or weren’t necessarily interested to learn at first. But for the industry, I think it’s useful to have that larger perspective and experience of filmmaking before getting too deep into one hat.
The biggest highlights from my time studying there were the people. Some of them I still work with, we sort of evolved together, like a species that kept migrating together.
What has your experience collaborating with fellow CFS graduates?Filmmaking is a bit like a traveling troupe. You build this tribe of people who speak the same language. Over time, you develop a kind of trust and rhythm that makes the work feel less like work. I really love that, and collaborating with Alumni feels like that.
I went on to do a master’s at NYU and co-founded a production company with CFS Alumni, Asya Segalovich, called bobadibob. This spring we made our first collective feature film in New York, made up of eight connected stories. We’re also producing a poetic/political documentary from Georgia that will be presented at the DOK Leipzig Co-Pro Market later this month.
I’m now working on my first feature, for which my short Habitat Hotel was a proof of concept, and with bobadibob we’re developing new projects that continue this idea of collective filmmaking.
Your film Habitat Hotel recently went to the San Sebastián International Film Festival! Can you please tell us more about that and your experience working on this film.
I loved making this film because it tells the story of people living in a hotel, and while shooting, we discovered that many of the real guests were living there too. Between scenes and breaks, we all had different encounters with them, and there was something special and meta about building a small world within another small world.
Premiering at San Sebastián was wonderful. They created a real sense of community among the filmmakers, I loved discovering everyone’s work from around the world and getting to know such talented people. San Sebastián is also a delight, when you’re not in a cinema, you’re at the sea, in the mountains, or at Bukowski Bar…
Where can people follow your work and stay update with your latest work?
My personal website is: www.marinaxarri.net and my Instagram is @lupine.22,
Our production company: @bobadibobfilms and collective projects: @collective.exchange.project