There’s a time when the novel ‘The Diner’ in which the narrator’s character returns to the places where she was with her sick mother. The waiting room of a cancer hospital, the room where she was admitted, the store where they bought a collection of Abba, the restaurant where they ate a hake that did not suit him… This week I have returned to Pamplona where 12 months ago I was shooting the film version of the novel that made me fall in love in 2015 when Gabriela Ybarra published it. The city had not yet woken up and after breakfast I decided to thank the saint whose chapel is in front of the hotel. I am neither a believer nor do I have any religious training, perhaps that is why I enter churches with pleasure and without prejudice. I like the energy of temples just as I like the energy of museums, which for me are the same thing, places of spirituality and recollection where we go with our fears and longings to put them to rest, to see if a change takes place. A church is for an urbanite the closest thing to the sea for those who live on the coast. The sea tells you that you are just a particle swarming through the cosmos, life is bigger than you. The church tells you that you feel what others already felt, you fear with their same fears, you are part of the others as the others are part of you. I left the church and walked through the city as I had gone down to breakfast, with my room card in hand.
I get excited hit the stage again that a year ago we invaded with our trucks and gadgets. Now she was alone and she told me “I was happy here & rdquor ;. I know I was happy because I was part of something and there is no more fulfilling feeling. We were a ‘troupe’ obstinate in reproducing on the screen a novel that in turn reproduces the life of Gabriela and her family. It was 14 years without making movies. It’s a long time. But at last I have returned to that house, that of my father who was a producer, director and screenwriter, to carry out a trade that he could never see me carry out. An extravagant profession that is half game, half highly sophisticated technique applied with great human and economic effort to break life apart, put it under the microscope and put it back together later. I also thought that there are many ways to hurt, to take revenge and hurt. With weapons, as in the story we narrate in ‘El comensal’, and with words.
In 2012, when I left the government, a producer assured me that I would never go back to the movies, no one would hire me. He was a person I trusted, I had gone to ask him for a job, and I believed him. “You will not return to the father’s house & rdquor; it is a biblical curse. I have had to purge my sins in these two seven-year periods, because ‘El comensal’ has been filmed and premiered. It has been a long road and if we have reached the goal it is due to the efforts of its producers Gerard Herrero, many years at the head of Tornasol, and the very young and brave Isabel Delclaux that has sheltered from the storms and defended the film from day one. You have to be of a special paste to be a producer, I lack that stamina. One more movie is something that the universe does not need and I would sink to the second “no”. Producers, whether they are newcomers or veterans, courageously face many “no”.
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These days in the newspapers they talk about them, about their struggle not to be expelled from the map by the big groups. I hope they are heard because cinema is a way of inhabiting ourselves, it is a way of meaning for others, of registering, codifying and disseminating our experience and there are no formulas to attract the viewer’s gaze. If there were, it would be the safest business in the world and not one of the highest risk. ORA film that we like leaves its mark on us, but that mark can only be found by each narrator in his own way, juggling between the logic of creation and the pragmatic logic of industry. A cinematography is better when there are many and all of us who make films. That is what independent producers try to explain and safeguard: a world of films of all sizes, styles and colors that make up a more accurate portrait of who we are.
Culture is only for that, to put ourselves in the place of the other be it to go on adventures and save the world as a superhero or to know that the same thing that hurt us hurts others. Culture asks the questions that unite us through what separates us. It is not a parliament or a battlefield to attack us. It is a table where we meet where there is always room for someone else. Let’s not stop making room for it.
To be many, to be different | Article by Ángeles González-Sinde