There is another Nicolas Steil. He produces films in Luxembourg and appears before I do when someone searches our name. This letter is for him.
Dear Nicolas,
Every so often, someone from the European film world visits my LinkedIn profile. Producers, directors, festival people. They stay a few seconds — puzzled, I suppose — and leave.
To some of them I write. Always the same thing:
It was not me.
Then I explain that there is another Nicolas Steil. That he lives in Luxembourg, that he produces films, that he holds a considerably better position than mine on Google. I ask them, if they ever run into you, to tell you that in Chile there is a man with your exact name, and that the situation is starting to irritate him a little.
So far, everyone has laughed.
Me too. More or less.
I discovered you by googling myself, which is already a confession.
I did my homework, so you can see this letter is not improvised: you were born on January 2, 1961, in Luxembourg. You were a journalist and covered the war in Lebanon. In 1983 you joined television as a reporter and news anchor. In 1986 you founded your production company. Since then you have produced or co-produced some fifty-five films, in five languages.
In 1983 — that same year — I was born in Santiago de Chile, in a corner house that today no longer has a number. While you were beginning to put our name on your country's news, I was learning to say it.
You have been ahead since the start. That much is beyond dispute.
Let me clear something up, because it would be the obvious thing to assume: I never felt you had stolen my name. That would have been simpler — a theft, at least, gives you the right to complain. You came first, you worked for decades, and it is almost certain you don't know I exist. The name belonged to us both, and you used it. There is no crime in that.
What happens to me is something else, and I can say it without difficulty: a mixture of jealousy, pride and urgency. I don't want your career. I don't want to produce films or live in Luxembourg.
Although maybe one day I will direct a short film. The idea is simple. When my father took his own life, we had to go and identify the body at the morgue of the hospital in San Antonio. I didn't go in; my grandfather and my uncle Jorge did. My uncle Jorge looked at my father's hands and saw they were purple, and for a moment he imagined my father had tried to resist death. Then a nurse came in, one of those very warm ones. What was actually happening was that she was putting ink on his fingers, to record his fingerprints.
That is the film. Maybe someday I will make it.
But every time someone looks for you and finds me, an absurd comparison takes place — it lasts half a second and leaves a small mark: you have films. I, for now, have explanations.
You also have a word. Filmography. A word that takes forty years of work and turns them into a unit, into something that can be looked at all at once. I have a company, a family, texts, finished projects and several unfinished ones — and no word to contain them. I know all my drafts. Of you, on the other hand, I know only the finished work.
Maybe that is what I envy. Not the life: the form.
Now I have to confess something worse.
I have never seen one of your films. I have promised several strangers on LinkedIn that I would — “yes, of course, I'll watch it” — and it is starting to get embarrassing. This week, instead of keeping my word, I did something more comfortable: I read what the two films you yourself directed are about.
Réfractaire: a student who hides underground to avoid being drafted, carrying the surname of a father the whole town points at.
Le chemin du bonheur: a boy separated from his parents at the age of six, who survives by inventing another reality to live in.
I will not explain here why those two stories left me staring at the screen for a long while. That belongs to a larger text I am writing. Let us just say that, without knowing it, you have spent years making films about things I know by heart.
I still don't know what to do with that.
I am not writing so you will give me the name back. Nor to dispute first place on Google, though I cannot promise you I have entirely given up that ambition.
I am writing because, without knowing me, you became a question that visits me every so often: what am I doing with this name? For years I believed the answer had to be a body of work — something large, visible, the equivalent of a filmography. I am no longer so sure. A name is also filled with things Google does not know how to sort.
For what it is worth: I am writing a book. In it there is a house that lost its number, a grandfather we called by a name that was not his, and now — I suppose it was inevitable — there is you.
When I finally watch Réfractaire, I will write to you again.
Greetings from Chile,
Nicolás Steil The other one. The one with the accent.