An exiled Venezuelan director returns home to make a fiction film based on his own self-destructive father, who is cast to play himself. Father and son venture to the Amazon jungle to reenact the father's crazy misadventures of the past in illegal gold mining. Meant to bring them together, the film begins to conjure Father's deep-set pains of the present and a future devoid of his son. Their extremely personal approach to filmmaking spirals into something that could tear them apart forever. Through cinema vérité, EL FATHER PLAYS HIMSELF explores the irreparable estrangement of migration and the limits of cinema in the representation of ourselves and those we love.