The story of an underground boxer that is blinded by his own ambition, and whose obsession ends up challenging his relationship and marking his own destiny.

Boxing is known to be one of the most cinematic sports. That is because crude focus, determination and rage is something that often directly ties in to the person’s persona outside of the ring, and it also makes for some really intense shots. The Gasser Brothers were able to bring another dimension to that reality in their highly suspenseful film. “Beloved Stranger” narrates the story of an underground boxer that is blinded by his own ambition, and whose obsession ends up challenging his relationship and marking his own destiny.

Which is the path to choose when one is blinded by ambition?

“Beloved Stranger” is our first short film and therefore our first approach into narrative filmmaking. Since weʼre used to work on commercial projects where you always have a client with restrictions behind, the idea of developing and creating a short film without any type of boundaries felt very appealing to us. Thatʼs why we decided to give it a try, and we must say the it has been a very gratifying experience for us. It was actually supposed to be a much simpler and basic project, but by the time we were developing it, we realized that it had turned into a much more complex story.

The introduction of underground boxing as an obsession of our main character seemed like a really appropriate but at the same time frightening idea to us. Bringing those scenes to life and making them look as real as possible became one of our main challenges along the project. Rehearsal and making several tests became a key point to make the choreographies and the acting work for us. At the same time, the task of finding real boxers that had acting nuances, rather than finding actors and teaching them how to fight, was another challenge. Thereʼs an abysmal difference between those two concepts. When we met Juanma Chacón and he joined the team, we knew we had found the perfect man for the job. We shot the whole thing in 5 days. As always, time is a determining factor when youʼre out there shooting, and as all of us know, you just never have enough of it. As we had many shots to cover in several locations, we had to try to avoid loosing time as much as we could. Thats why we ended up building two locations (the jail cell and the bathroom) in the same warehouse where the fight scenes were shot. Searching for those specific locations and getting the whole team there to shoot would have been expensive and much less time efficient.

As we already mention in the beginning, making this short film has been a very intense but gratifying experience for us. It has offered us the opportunity to explore our own boundaries and to meet new interesting people along the way. Itʼs definitely en experience to repeat, and weʼre already working on new ideas for future projects.