La Seminci gets fully involved with an “atmospheric” thriller, an ode to cinema and a luminous look at old age

The director, Goya, has explained to the new direction with ‘The wound’, in 2013, that when he read the work He was “very interested in how he talked about the family.” and then he was also attracted by the challenge of adapting a “very complex” text in terms of the treatment of time. Furthermore, he not only set out to investigate a new genre for him, but also “a more sophisticated staging”: “My recurring way of recording has been the use of sequence shots and a shoulder camera, but now I wanted to distance myself from that (…) Filming has been a continuous learning process.”

As soon as he began his intervention, he detailed that his “first job” was to put the novel in order and “transfer the destructuring it had to something cinematic”, for which He had to go “many times” to the script until he found the one he thought could work. A work in which even the interpreters themselves had a lot to do with, since “they put a lot of what ends up in writing,” he confessed.

In this regard, the actress Sonia Almarcha, who plays the mother, explained that they had the opportunity to «rehearse a lot, try, make mistakessee where we were going and share it.” »When we arrived at the filming the family was ready and there was a whole job where the eyes were in their place«.

“For me, It has been a discovery to work in this line of subtlety, of the sensitive and less of the text. In this, Fernando is a master,” Diego Garisa highlighted. For her part, the Canarian actress Julia Martínez, who makes her feature film debut with this film, has highlighted the »trust and communication« that there has always been. Essential, he considered, because one of the »great challenges« of the film, everyone agreed, is the work of intimacy of the actors.

Taking over in the morning was the Brazilian Gabriel Mascaro with ‘The blue path’, a surreal dystopia set in a moment that could very well be the present: the Government has decided that anyone who reaches the age of 80 must be removed from daily life and confined in a specific colony. Reality unexpectedly hits Tereza, a 77-year-old woman, when she finds out that they have finally decided to advance the set age by five years, and faced with her daughter’s passivity, she decides to flee forward in pursuit of one last dream: flying on a plane. According to Mascaro, the film arose when, after the death of her grandfather, the widow decided to start painting. For him, that decision was a way to “give life new meaning.”

The last protagonist of the morning has been acclaimed Chinese director Bi Gan with ‘Resurrection’. The film is structured in five parts, one for each of the senses: smell, taste, touch, sight and hearing, and offers the viewer a dreamlike visual epic in constant mutation, which jumps from one genre to the opposite and from one cinematographic style or format to another. The film, a colossal ode to cinema built to deny its eternal death, responds to the filmmaker’s assumption of cinema as “a game”, as he explained in a press conference reported by Ical.

In it he has detailed that he began writing this circular journey around the 20th century through cinema in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, to subsequently dedicate about a year to filming, and since then he has continued working on an endless montage that was not even concluded after winning the Grand Jury Prize in Cannes, since the version that has now been shown in Valladolid “includes changes.”

«For me the most important thing is not the film itself, nor its structure. The forms of cinema matter to me but they are not the fundamental thing for me, the most important thing is the emotion it transmits, not only towards cinema, but towards the world,” he said.