Such is the premise of "El Bolero," an independent short film written, directed and edited by Rob DelGaudio of Hopkinton. A "bolero" is the colloquial word in Mexico for a shoeshine man.
The 13-minute movie has been selected for presentation at the Boston International Film Festival and will be screened Wednesday, June 13, at 4 p.m. at Loews Boston Common, 175 Tremont St., Boston.
The film represents the first dramatic venture for DelGaudio's Hopkinton-based film production company, Black Pearl Productions. The firm specializes in corporate commercials.
"El Bolero" traces its origins to a trip DelGaudio made several years ago to Mexico, where he, too, reluctantly agreed to a shoeshine. It became an eye-opening experience.
"The bolero jabbed and prodded at the leather with a firm, practiced touch, like a baker working a ball of dough," DelGaudio writes in a production note for the film. "I was expecting the procedure to only take a couple of minutes (a few wipes with a rag, a little brushing, add some polish and we're done), but instead it took 15.
"It seemed to me that he wasn't so much cleaning and shining as he was rebuilding and refurbishing. And when he was done my shoes were glossy-bright, looking as if I had just pulled them fresh out of the box. They were shoes reborn."
Shortly after the shoeshine, DelGaudio's father died and his mother was left alone. "He and my mom were lovebirds," writes the director. "The type that after 55 years of marriage still held hands in public and gave each other sweet, sentimental cards signed 'all my love always' to mark their engagement, wedding anniversaries, birthdays and the like.
"About a month after his passing I was visiting my mom and opened a kitchen cabinet to get a coffee cup. Right at eye level, leaning against his favorite mug, was a snapshot of my dad. It caught me off guard and spoke volumes about how much she missed him."
The intersection of those two events forms the basis for "El Bolero," a story mainly about reclaiming life. Mixing magic with the ordinary, the film uses "a minimum of dialogue, and a lot of shoes," quips DelGaudio.
He describes the film as "magic realism."
"There's a pull of love across time," he says. "If you have a true love in your life, when that person passes on, there's such a void that's created. It can be difficult to overcome. This is a film that explores those feelings. What if something could change that reality, and what are the ramifications? Also, be careful what you wish for, because you may expect one thing but it doesn't necessarily work out that way."
The film's realism gets a boost from the fact that the short was shot on location in Mexico City, filmed in Spanish and features a Mexican cast - Ernesto Casillas Angeles plays the widower and Rubin Gonzalez Rodriguez is the shoeshine man.
"I have a client based out of Mexico I've been doing work for for more than 10 years, so I was doing a lot of traveling in Mexico," says DelGaudio. "It just was a place I really took a shine to." Pun unintended, we assume.
"I found the culture fascinating. It was so different from anything I'd been exposed to. Growing up in Connecticut and going to college in Montana, Mexico was a universe away, quite frankly. It seemed like a place with so many dichotomies. You have ultra-modern against things that haven't changed since the 1500s.
"I was kind of a sponge during my travels through there, so when it came time to try and figure out where we'd like to do some dramatic filmmaking, we chose (Mexico). Looking around, it seemed like a market that had potential, that was underserved. Also, a growing percentage of the movie-going population in the United States is Hispanic. I found the culture attractive and interesting. It was a great field to mine in terms of story ideas."
DelGaudio's cinematic career began as a film major at Montana State University. "I originally started out as a fine arts major - painting and graphic design - but switched over to film," he says.
"I liked the fact that it brought together all these different artistic disciplines I was interested in - music, design work, writing, working with actors. With painting and graphic design, you cloister yourself off. Also, in the 1980s there was no Photoshop. You had to do everything by hand, and I just wasn't neat enough. I always had smudges all over my work. I was not destined to be a graphic designer."
He started Black Pearl Productions in 1993, taking the title not from the ship in "Pirates of the Caribbean" but from finding a black pearl in a clam.
Corporate work became the company's raison d'etre because that's what came its way. "Very few of us has a master plan," says DelGaudio. "Life happens. I was married. I wanted a job. I had to pay the bills."
While corporate work did pay the bills, it also gave DelGaudio the opportunity to hone his craft. Clients over the years have included General Electric, Gillette, Reebok, Liberty Mutual, John Hancock and Boston University.
"'El Bolero' was a chance to get back to roots established in my film school days," says DelGaudio. "Not selling someone else's message is a lot of fun. Why did I wait so long?"
The self-financed film was shot on a shoestring budget beginning in 2005 and finishing up in 2006.
"El Bolero" has already won audience choice and jurors' favorite awards at the North Shore's Filmnorth festival, and was also chosen and screened at the Boston Cinema Census in Cambridge and the Gasparilla Film Festival in Tampa, Fla. In July, it will screen at the N.Y. Latino Film Festival.
DelGaudio is working on a feature-length version of "El Bolero" and another short that may be shot locally.
For the record, "El Bolero" has nothing to do with Ravel's orchestral piece "Bolero," which became popularized in the 1979 film "10." That said, the thought of Bo Derek shining shoes is intriguing.
For more information on the Boston International Film Festival, go to its Web site, www.bifilmfestival.com.
