Almost 20 years ago, Spanish director, journalist and music producer Fernando Trueba began doing interviews to investigate the mysterious disappearance and presumed murder of Brazilian jazz pianist Francisco Tenório Júnior in 1976. But he didn’t know what he’d do with the material. He thought about a book or a documentary film.
But a few years later, after he’d made the animated film “Chico & Rita” and received an Oscar nomination, it occurred to him that the story of Tenório Júnior might be right for animation.
“I realized that if I made a documentary with people talking about him, it was going to be one hour of closeups of people talking about a dead guy,” said Trueba, best known for live-action films like “Year of Enlightenment,” “The Girl of Your Dreams” and “Belle Époque,” which won the 1992 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
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