Actor turned writer and director Juan Pablo Di Pace is making his feature debut with a decades-spanning meta romance. The star co-directs “Before We Forget” with Andrés Pepe (“Argentina, 1985”) from a script he wrote; the iconic late Norman Lear, who died in 2023, is an executive producer.
“Before We Forget” is a staggeringly beautiful depiction of trying (and sometimes failing) to remember every detail of our first loves. Di Pace leads the film as Matias, an Argentine filmmaker grappling with an unfinished movie that was inspired by his friendship with a Swedish classmate he met at boarding school in 1997. As the logline teases, “their bond, defined by tenderness and fascination, is abruptly severed when Alexander (Oscar Morgan) is expelled, leaving young Matias (Santiago Madrussan) with a story of unspoken emotions. Twenty-five years later, Matias reopens Pandora’s box, coming face-to-face with Alexander (August Wittgenstein) once again. As life begins to imitate art, Matias is drawn into a deeply personal portrait of the past, memory, and the elusive search for closure.”
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The film travels through time, with the characters of Matias and Alexander each being shared by two aforementioned actors. The roles of Roma and Paolo are also played by dual actors: for Roma, Araceli González as a teen and Marta Beatriz Maineri as an adult, with Paolo being played by Tomás Kirzner at the younger age and Juan Cruz Márquez de la Serna in modern day. The cast additionally includes Fabián Mazzei, Sarah Parish, Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, Julia Bender, Krista Kosonen, Vittorio Di Pace, Lini Evans, Agustina Lecouna, and Joaquín Gaitan.
Filmmaker Di Pace told IndieWire that “Before We Forget” is his own “cinematic response” to Claude Debussy’s “Afternoon of a Faun.”
“There’s this delicate yearning in that music — a dreamy, teenage ache for someone that is sacredly sensual,” Di Pace said. “That quality, both epic and intimate, became a guiding light for the tone of our film.”
As for the personal nature of the drama, Di Pace added, “I think every storyteller leaves a trace of themselves in their work. In our case, Andrés, my co-director, and I wanted to tell a story rooted in our own experiences. We drew from people we knew, places we loved, and situations that felt intimately close to us. That way, we could truly inhabit each character’s skin and tell something authentic. The inspiration came from a personal place: the adult looking back at a memory they can’t quite let go of. Something that stays with you — not because it’s dramatic, but because it’s too precious to explain. For me, that memory was my first love.”
Di continued, “This film holds 30 years of friendship between Andrés and me — we met in high school back in 1995. It’s filled with soul and memory. But more than anything, we hope ‘Before We Forget’ reminds people of a kind of tenderness we’re starting to lose in cinema. It’s not a film that needs to shock or explode. It’s more like a quiet space — somewhere we can reflect, maybe even heal, together. It’s for parents who are trying to figure out how to support their kids, for adults still haunted by their first love, and for teenagers living it for the first time, right now.”
“Before We Forget” is produced by Di Pace, Guillermo Escalona, Amanda Lenker Doyle, and Alvaro R. Valente, with Lear, Brent Miller, Stephanie Slack, Margret Huddleston, Massimiliano Milic, Gonzalo Lopez Jordan, Bob Hayes, Jim Burba, and Kent Robert Gibbons executive producing. The co-producers are Martín Granados, Juan Ignacio Gorelik, Guido Segal, Valentina Bach, and Roberta Ghedini.
The Film Collaborative will premiere “Before We Forget” in New York on July 11, in Los Angeles on July 18, and in additional markets on July 25. Check out the trailer below.
