“I gave Careyes everything… My youth, intelligence and my money.” Gian Franco Brignone
The first time I met the barefooted long gray haired Gian Franco Brignone, he insisted I speak only Spanish as our pod of writers were escorted to his Mediterranean / jungle tower home. A retired Italian banker/artist/ free spirit gone native in the jungles of Mexico, I could see he did everything on a grand scale. He was quite the jet setty Merlin; a dashing senior eccentric with a passion of weaving nature and architecture into a living experience. Costa Careyes was his experiment and knew I would like this guy even though I couldn't understand a word he said in his enclave on the coast between Puerto Vallerta and Manzinillo.
photos by Wendy Abrams
The drama had begun in this kingdom of Brignone, a 4,000 acre coastal community and sea turtle refuge with fifty palapa homes without walls and jungley ocean oriented perches to rent plus fifty casitas, two castles (Oriente and Sol) and a hotel. Brignone was in finance and banking from a prominent family in Torino Italy. After WWII he moved to Paris to help rebuild and refinance much of the city and in the process became a non-conformist anti-war visionary who wanted to dedicate his life to La Dolce Vida and truth and beauty bringing the best of the Mediterranean to the wilds of Mexico. He fell in love with the land which he flew over in a small plane in the late 1960’s. “ It was love at first sight,” he says like a mystic. “I hope it will last a lifetime.”
And what a life it has been. He has the spirit of a filmmaker and an unusual eye for beauty that has served him and his guests well. “I was lucky to have one eye (Brignone is blind in one eye), because I could see with one and feel with the other.” As a result, over the years after starting his love affair with one bungalow where the land, the beaches, jungles and sky sustained him, he felt and saw enough to pioneer a lifestyle of indoor/outdoor Mexican luxurious living raising the traditional palapa to sensuous playpens and visual masterpieces. Brignone found his canvas with the solid and contemporary use of concrete mixing bold colors like aqua marine blue, sienna, golds and yellows to perch stunningly grand thatch palapas with crowns the size of Mt. Everest, He surrounded himself with brilliant architects like Luis Barragan, Jean Claude Galibert, Alberto Mazzoni, Diego Villasenor and Marco Aldaaco, and his relationships with his architects were as organic as his biological family.
Gian Franco and his son Giorgio Brignone
photo by Wendy Abrams
Brignone is a glowing eighty -something surrealist and one can only hope to be as exuberant, and spiritually radiant at his age. When he talks to you he seems delighted to have the honor of your company. He has both grandfatherly warmth and the bad boy quality of a renegade. His ability to balance those aspects of his personality makes him very charming. Much of the Careyes lure is the man behind the architecture and the cultural international road show that goes with the territory. It attracts a worldly crew and life is lived inside and out so both the individual and the performer can cohabitate. Nurturing the soul is tantamount and each corner, doorway, house and dwelling offers another passage to the fantastic.
http://www.elixirdecareyes.com/#
Wendy @ Careyes
CAREYES CREATION LAB
Each spring during the ArteCareyes Film & Arts Festival, the ?! Careyes Foundation collaborates to produce an intensive workshop on acting and film for young actors and filmmakers from Mexico and Latin America, along with the Ingmar Bergman Chair of the UNAM, Cinema23 Iberoamerican Film Association, and the Morelia International Film Festival. The program is curated by Marina Stavenhagen.
The Careyes Creation Lab began in 2015 and is weeklong workshop coordinated by a prestigious international filmmaker to explore both the theory and praxis of filmmaking. The ?! Careyes Foundation also hosts special film screenings for the local community in collaboration with Cinépolis.
Workshop Directors:
- 2015: Volker Schlöndorff (1979 Oscar, Best Foreign Film, and Palme d'Or, The Tin Drum)
- 2016: Pawel Pawlikowski (2015 Oscar and BAFTA, Best Foreign Film, Ida)
- 2017: Joan Darling (Emmy and Directors Guild of America award winner)
