Milani Perera sat down with Hugo Diego Garcia and Lorenzo Bentivoglio at the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, where their debut feature premiered in the festival’s “Rebels With a Cause” section. Only a few hours after that world premiere, Vache Folle travelled across the ocean for its Latin American premiere at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival, where it went on to win both the Audience Award and the Special Jury Mention — a remarkable feat for two self-taught outsiders who built their film from scratch.

What follows is a conversation with two debut directors who entered filmmaking not through institutions or permission, but through necessity. Hugo and Lorenzo are the kind of underdog artists who turn rejection into propulsion — filmmakers who rely on instinct rather than formal training, and who refuse to let industry walls define the scope of their imagination. Hugo and Lorenzo are not simply debut filmmakers; they are architects of their own cinematic language. With Vache Folle, they’ve announced themselves — loudly, defiantly — as rebels who refuse to wait for permission. The world is now watching. And they are just getting started. In this conversation, they revisit the beginnings of their creative partnership, the self-forged process behind the film, the making of their visceral protagonist Cédric, and what lies ahead for their cinematic universe.

MP: What first stirred the desire to become storytellers?

HG: Storytelling wasn’t a dream — it was refuge. I grew up in a village where filmmaking didn’t exist. My parents were in business and human resources. Cinema belonged to another universe. My brother and I watched films obsessively; we performed scenes, I drew manga. But we never imagined it as a profession. Later, I studied law, boxed, and tried my hand at theatre. Nothing aligned. The world kept saying “no,” so I learned to say “yes” to myself.

LB: I was like a child possessed by imagination — copying movies, reenacting battles. School wasn’t for me, acting school even less. I understood early on that I learn through experience, simply by doing something. So I filmed, I failed, I knew. Meeting Hugo sealed it — we recognised the same hunger.

MP: Without film school, how did you build your craft?

LB: Curiosity and survival. We shot scenes on cheap cameras. Edited for months. Devoured films. Observed people. Mistake after mistake — until the mistakes became style.

HG: When you have no money, you replace resources with instinct. We learned cinematography because no one else could shoot. We learned editing because no one else could cut. Everything we failed at became something we understood deeply.

MP: How did your partnership evolve into co-directing?

HG: I cast Lorenzo in a short about my father’s life. He wasn’t just acting — he was shaping the film. He saw angles that I didn’t. By the second short, he was doing cinematography and co-creating scenes with me. So when Vache Folle came, it was obvious — we should merge visions.

LB: Hugo is the origin and architecture. I am instinct and motion. I direct through emotion — through feeling the pulse of a scene. Together, we form the same heartbeat.

MP: How did you create Cédric — this beaten, tender, violent anti-hero?

HG: He’s a displaced version of me. Same age, same landscape, but pushed down harder by life. I borrowed my own mistakes and turned the volume up. We wanted a character shaped by love and violence at once — a poetic Rambo in a French realist world.

LB: I know Hugo. Working with him is like directing the part of myself I never speak about. Cédric came from that fusion — two emotional worlds merging into one man. He’s fragile and dangerous, innocent and flawed. He’s us.

MP: Why did you choose to make him a former soldier abandoned by the state?

HG: Because it’s a universal wound. A soldier is trained to serve — and then discarded. It’s not politics, but humanity. Someone built for intensity but returned to a world where intensity has no place. Narrative-wise, it creates stakes: trauma, competence, danger. Artistically, it anchors him in a tragic paradox.

LB: He’s a guy trying his best — but society moves too fast. He becomes a criminal because there’s no other road left open. That’s the real tragedy.

MP: Take me into the creation of the film. How did Vache Folle begin?

HG: COVID, a breakup, and no money. I moved from LA back to a mountain cabin with Lorenzo, my brother Milo, and our friend David. We trained like boxers during the day, created like possessed artists at night. I wrote the script fast — a month of pure emotion. One night, I asked: “Shall we make a feature?“, and they all said yes; the next morning, we bought a camera. That was our film school.

LB: We had nothing but desire. Out-of-focus frames, wrong lenses — we corrected, improved, and refined. We grew as the film grew.

MP: The edit took years. What finally brought the film to completion?

HG: We almost killed it, almost turned it into a music video. We almost abandoned it, but Lorenzo refused to surrender. Then, slowly, we found allies — mentors, producers, people who saw our raw cut and said, “There is cinema here. Don’t stop.” The editor of Titane, Jean-Christophe Bouzy, gave us crucial guidance. Suddenly, the film could breathe again.

MP: Where do you stand now, after this journey?

LB: Hugo builds the universe, I give it movement and heartbeat. I act, I shoot, I direct with him — it’s symbiosis.

HG: And Cédric is us. I wrote him from my contradictions; Lorenzo shaped him from his instincts. It’s collaboration at its most intimate.

MP: What comes next for you both?

HG: Even with awards, we remain outsiders. No agent, no distributor, no system behind us. But festivals opened a door. As actors, we have upcoming projects. Together, we co-produced a gritty police short directed by FJKO. And we’re developing our next feature — in the same universe as Vache Folle. Our goal now is to sharpen our signature — a blend of violence and tenderness, realism and myth.

LB: We’ll keep breaking rules. Keep filming. Keep fighting. This is only the beginning.