The True Story Behind I Confess

In October 2013, I produced my short film I Confess. For those of you who are new here, I am a filmmaker. I write, edit, film and produce short films. All of my short films have been inspired by something that has had some form of an impact on me in my personal life. 
I am the most positive upbeat person with a great outlook on life. However, I express the devastating snippets of my life through the medium of my short films. I Confess was one of these very moments. 

Let me take you back a few years to when I was in my early 20’s. Firstly I was in Colombia, living with my family and I was a student at university studying System Technology. However, I hated it! 
Colombia is a very different place to here in the U.K If you do not wish to go to university the only other option is to go into the army. I wanted to do neither of these things. There is no state welfare in Colombia like there is here in the U.K so this was never even an option. I wanted to travel, I wanted to see the world. So I went travelling and I ended up settling in London, England. My journey from being a young adult at university to living in London is a rollercoaster of a ride and something I will definitely share in the future! 
I moved to London, England where I found work as a cleaner in a food establishment. I worked tiring days and before I knew it I was part of the London rat race. London is an amazing place full of life but everyone is working hard to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have to impress people that they don’t even like. This was the rat race and I just needed to survive it and keep my head above water. I found these days so hard getting up early in the morning to go to one job and then another job before going home for a matter of hours before starting my routine all over again. Along with this there was a huge obstacle to overcome which was the language barrier. I was a Colombian speaking Spanish living and working in a country that speaks English! When I arrived in London I could not speak a word of English. 

In this time I missed my family back home in Colombia incredibly. There were so many days when I wanted to escape but now I was in a position where the only option was to keep on going forward, keep on ploughing through for I knew deep in my heart that I would get to where I wanted to be eventually. 
It was at these times that I would go to the toilets of where I worked I would lock myself in one of the big cubicles sit down and for those few moments I was at peace. I could be myself, I could take time to breathe and to think. It was in here that I wrote a piece in Spanish called Lo Confieso which in English is I Confess. Even at those times working in London, I never forgot my actor roots it was and is something that will always be deeply rooted in my soul. Lo Confieso was a tragic story that I wrote at a very dark time in my life. I sat in the large bright toilet cubicle in my black and white overalls, I wrote and I cried. At that very moment in time I wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere else. I wanted an escape and this is what Lo Confieso was all about. I felt trapped like I could not see a light at the end of the tunnel, not even a flicker. 
Little did I know that around 10 years later I would take Lo Confieso, translate it into English and adapt it into I Confess and produce it as a short film here in Scotland with ELGATO Film Productions. One of my mantras in life is “Everything Happens For a Reason” and I truly believe this. As unbelievably miserable as it was living through those times in London, it happened for a reason. That experience made me the person that I am today sometimes in life you have to have had nothing in order to appreciate everything!