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Alfredo Hueck

alfredohueck

director

To get to know me well, let’s begin with my last name: It reads Hueck, but it is pronounced HOOK. My German ancestors were supposedly farmers, and they went around with hooks everywhere to carry the sacks of rice or potato, this made the town give them the name Hüeck, which is a way of saying “hook” in German.

Peruvian mother, Venezuelan father I was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, surrounded by situations that I always say “someday I’ll film them”, like when I was 18 years old and some girlfriends invited me to a session with a “fortune teller” in downtown Caracas. The lady was ironing a heap of shirts, my thoughts were “maybe that’s how she makes ends meet”. What the fortune teller told me, because as the years have gone by she has earned my respect with many of her predictions coming true. The fortune teller told me I would be surrounded by women my whole life, and I thought, “of course, a renowned filmmaker, Hollywood, Cannes, Venice, yachts, parties, women in bikinis everywhere fighting each other to get to travel with me… Anyway, I never really trusted those predictions, until they started to become true all by themselves.

Time went by, and despite my father’s disapproval for choosing such a “doubtful” career, I studied Marketing and Advertising in the mornings, and film at night. I started as an intern in a TV channel, and I was the editing assistant for the first SITCOM in the country. I quickly jumped to editor and began editing commercials, music videos, short films and slowly I entered the Venezuelan filmmaking mafia. My first short film shot in 16mm made one of the fortune teller’s predictions come true; I would get to know the world thanks to my passion, movies. My short film was chosen an awarded as the best Latin-American short-film in Madrid, award which I received from Pedro Almodóvar and Penelope Cruz, and even though my parents didn’t know who they were, I was convinced that it was possible to live from moviemaking in Venezuela. So I kept making short films which took me to film festivals at Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles, Miami, San Diego, New York, Buenos Aires, Cuzco.

Then, another prediction came true: my last name would break records in my country, and that was when my brother and I wrote the highest box-office film in Venezuelan history “Papita Maní Tostón”. She also told me I would migrate, but that didn’t surprise me very much because I have always been Anti-Chávez and I was feeling less in my country with each passing day. What did catch me by surprise was how long it took for me to leave. But I didn’t leave until I made my first movie “Paquete#3”, a political satire that, if anything, leaves me with a clear conscience as a Venezuelan filmmaker.

In 2011 I moved to Miami with my camera. 4 years later a doctor at a maternity clinic placed in my arms my second daughter, and when I saw myself surrounded by my wife, my eldest daughter, my mother-in-law and my beautiful mother, she said: blessed are thee amongst so many women and BUM! The old fortune teller never told me she meant my beautiful family! So fuck the yacht parties, now my daughters are the world to me.

The fortune teller warned me I would get divorced and I didn’t believe her, but she told me that I would arrive at a home where they would never let me go. So here I am, ready and imagining a better future.