“Think with their hands”, he is heard from Godard in the image book who knows whether in the penultimate effort, as revolutionary and poetic as cryptic and delirious, to free the image of the pictorial dictatorship of the eyes;
to bring cinema closer to the most elementary, to what comes before even thought.
In his own way, the phrase makes the old teaching of Robert Bresson convinced that the soul and the heart of a film must be felt before anything as a work of those same hands.
The cinema as a tactile exercise, as a haptic experience.
And who knows whether that and not another is the creed of Carla Simón (Barcelona, 1986) and Isaki Lacuesta (Gerona, 1975).
The two coincide in probably as many things as they separate them.
But there are a series of issues that condemn them from already to be the cinematographic couple of the year;
From the one that starts, not from that it concludes with the Goya of today.
First, and by imminent, both are in the official section of the Berlinale, which began on Thursday. His films will be presented on Monday and Tuesday. First you will see a year, one night, that of Lacuesta, and the next day, Alcarràs, that of Simon. Second, and by the event, it made decades that Spanish cinema did not acquire a relevance as well at an international festival of Class A calls. Without leaving Berlin, we must go back to the end of the 70s and early 80s of The hand of Saura, Camus, García Sánchez and Martínez-Lázaro – all sons of his talent and, why not, of the law looked-to witness something similar after an immense drought only paralled with the apparitions of Almodóvar or Coixet. And third, by hands. The two films attach the generational mark that, very summarized, has to do with a way of understanding and living the cinema “as a search” (the expression is Carla). But, above all, as a search that is stained and that there is to mold with the primary, earthy and even raw elements of the same life. Hardic filmmakers, therefore.
Remember the 1993 Summer Director how important it was for her to see the legend of time in 2006, the first time of the twice gold shell in San Sebastián.
“He opened a door.
I realized that there was another type of cinema and act that I had not seen in Spain always delivered to that mode of acting so act. ”
He confesses that he excites him the almost love statement (only almost) and appoints Joaquím Jordá, José Luis Guerín, Marc Refa and Agustí Villaronga as a Masters before him with whom he dialogue.
“I understand that it is a generation generation chain,” aims one for, then, becoming the two together in the same cinema as part of the conviction of his vitality.
He is alive: “You never know what you will find when you start shooting.
I discover it in the act of moving ».
A year, one night reconstructs the wounds of a surviving couple of the attack in the Paris Bathaclán room. The actors Nahuel Pérez Biscayart and No Merlant are the protagonists. Alcarràs also deals with poorly cured injuries. In this case, the cause is the crisis within a family that is forced to sell its lands. Here everything is natural actors, actors who are not professionally. So different and, however and again, so close. «I want to believe,” he takes the word lactose, “that there is something in common beyond the sonidist Eva Valiño, who has worked with both, and beyond the form, and I think that it unites us is the appeal to a Species of collective spirit to recover ». And follows: “When I started planning the film, I wanted something to be something propositive, it was not a complaint movie but how we want to live. I recently went to a concert by Nacho Vegas and I felt the excitement of being together again in a room. It is that collective experience that we do not want to give up despite what happened in Bataclán, despite the pandemic, despite everything. It is a call to fight for something as elementary as love. Let’s go back to live together, to touch us despite everything that pushes us to live parceled, separately. ” “In my case,” the replica of Simon arrives, “what is played, as always in my cinema, is the conquest again of a damaged family spirit. The family should always win ». It is clear.
And so, as it could not be otherwise, the two reach their hands.
It is not just a generational or argument issue, but, hurrying, competition has to do even with the financial structure of each of the films.
The two are co-productions: that of Isaki with France, that of Simon with Italy.
“If we have done them only in Spain, they would have left the same, but worse,” says Simon.
The two strive to take care of this Spanish condemnation that associates the author’s cinema to simple and hard precariousness.
“The sensation is that in Spain the most personal cinema is always in a second budget division.
What Thomas Vinterberg in Denmark does with seven million in a film like hunting, you have to do it with one on the next skin.
Working in freedom in our country means that you have to do it in precarious leaving your life literally. ”
Word of lactose.
“Until we draw from the equation the premise of the heroic, of the cheap, a personal real cinema that also reaches the public will not be reached.
My cinema is very craftsman.
It is a choice.
But when you do things with very little money, craftsmanship ends up being a sorrowful … or, again, precarious. ”
Word now of Simon.
The two reason that this time have been able to work with money, which is as much as doing it with time and with guarantees.
Isaki’s film has among others with the support of bamboo productions.
“I do not understand that there is a commercial cinema and an author’s cinema.
So separated.
And I dislike the label of ‘other cinemas’.
Everything is cinema and with the same vocation to reach the public, “the director clarifies.
“The strange thing is to consider, as it is done in Spain, that the natural process of a film renounce co-production,” says the director.
“The strange thing is that the natural obey to a nineteenth and nationalist conception,” concludes the other.
And now the question: Why? What would need to change so that the exception to see two Spanish films in something like the “Grand Slam” (the expression is from Isaki) of international festivals will cease to be precisely that: a reason for amazement? “I think we do not give culture the real value it has. We do not finish believing the power of cinema to export the image of a country. How many things do we know about France or Japan for the cinema? My experience tells me that there were people who discovered that Catalan exists thanks to Summer 1993, “Simon responds by that of attacking the root. Lacpuesta, much more for the detail, prefers to cite an example to draw the size of the error, of our Spanish error: “Here, for example, no pre-production costs are never recognized for a help or a credit. And a movie begins to cost money five years before its premiere. The problem is that in a country that has been stolen so much, including from the cinema itself, everything is under suspicion. And that, precisely, forces malvivir or, much worse, to cheat. ” And so.
Be that as it may, Carla and Isaki or Simon and Lacuesta have already touched glory.
With the hands.
Hardic cinema, film that is sought, Spanish cinema in Berlin.
“A story about land belonging, about tradition and over the family.”
This is how the director defines her film about Los Solé, the family that after 80 years growing a land in Lleida is together for which it will be the last harvest.
Inspired by the Book of Ramón González ‘Paz, Love and Death Metal’, the film dives in the trauma of two survivors of the attack in the Bathaclán concert hall, in Paris, to rethink the need to return … to Bataclán.
