“I want dead to find me planting my cabbages, but without

                               worrying about her, and less still for my imperfect garden.”

                                                   Book 1, XX: “Philosophizing is to learn to die”

    Michel de Montaigne

Restaurando a Héctor is the culmination of the crucial circumstances it takes to conceive a short film. When I first met Joaquin Jordá, Catalan documentary filmmaker, I was in a pre-diabetic stage and unaware of it.  My relationship with Jordá was unique. While the other students talked about scripts and filmmaking, I talked with him about death, fear and life. At one point he introduced me to Dària Esteva. While talking with her the idea for this film was born. Hector is the rhinocerous head that she inherited from her father and it was in need of restoration. I told her about a taxidermist that works in Spain on a seasonal basis. She was interested in having her head fixed by him and I was interested in helping her.

Jordá passed away soon after I met Dària and the idea began to develop. as Jacinto left Hector as a legacy to Dària, I felt I was left with this lingering story from Joaquin. Dària decided to wait for Michel Romera, the taxidermist, to return to Barcelona to restore the head. Michel told me he wanted to write a book. It wasn’t the first time he mentioned it, but his idea resounded in me and Dària’s rhino head appeared again in my mind. This is how the story began to emerge, and now I was motivated to build upon the idea of an inherited rhinocerous head that needed restoration and a taxidermist who had a story to tell. I wanted to get inside the taxidermists' stories, to fragment them, to dissect them— just as the camera searches for the best light to represent Hector's head restored by the taxidermist who wanted to write…