“My film has a queer reading in its reflection on gender as something performative”
– We chatted with the Asturian filmmaker about her first foray into fiction, a rural tale with a gothic atmosphere starring Galician Tamar Novas and Portuguese Victória Guerra
(© Marcos Pereiro)
A teacher arrives in a remote Galician village, with deep-rooted customs and legends… Thus, like a Gothic story, it begins or open body [+lee también:
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entrevista: Ángeles Huerta
ficha de la película], mystery film he has directed angeles orchard after his first non-fiction feature film Esquece Monelos (2017). Starring Tamar Novas, Victoria Guerra Y Maria Vazquezthis Spanish-Portuguese production hits Spanish billboards on December 9, distributed by filmaxafter passing through festivals such as Gijón, where we exchanged some impressions.
Cineuropa: Various messages can be perceived under the guise of a gothic horror tale.
Angeles Huerta: Yes, the film is about how ridiculous are the borders and limits that constrain us and divide us at all levels, both linguistically and gender and sexually. It would be better if we embraced diversity, because I perceive that there are things in danger right now, also in culture.
It is true that local stories like yours, which appeals to the legacy of legends and beliefs, are ultimately universal.
Yes, but above all the film talks about the clash between a profoundly secularized world –that of reason– that distances us from the spiritual and impoverishes us, without references to face many things, and another that still preserves that spirituality.
The borderline and misty landscape helps a lot to create the mysterious atmosphere of Or open body.
The work of the cinematographer gina ferrer It’s impressive, he perfectly understood what we wanted to convey here. She convinced us to focus our gaze on the characters: it is a film of bodies, meats and skins, with references such as wuthering heights [+lee también:
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entrevista: Andrea Arnold
ficha de la película] by Andrea Arnold, with everything in a more framed format to focus on the human. The lands on the border between Portugal and Galicia are more open, not as fenced off as in the rest of the region, and where relations are very different from those that occur in a fenced and rationalized territory. There is a metonymy between the landscape and the bodies, both human and animal.
Your film also reminded me of the fantastic Spanish that was made in the seventies, like the forest of the wolf, by Pedro Olea.
The closest Spanish references are Rowing to the wind, by Gonzalo Suarez. In the film there is not enough blood or viscera to be part of the horror genre, but I did not conceive it that way but as a gothic feature film, as an exaltation of romanticism.
What seduced you about the story on which it is based (lobosandausby Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín) to turn it into a script?
There is a clear mechanism for making a classic possessions genre film, but it was the sensuality of the story that caught me, the boundless sensory potential that was already there. The film has a queer reading in its reflection on gender as something performative. I love the cinema of great passions!
You have signed a fiction film and another documentary. In which narrative do you feel most comfortable?
Both respond to a radical need to tell a story, because that’s how independent cinema works, to which you dedicate a lot of time, that’s why it must represent something very important to you on an intimate level. Esquece Monelos started from a vital moment that he was going through and or open body of a different one. The documentary is the freest of genres, allowing everything and playing with many forms. Fiction has its rules and the genre has its own, but the fable has something magical. You have to take people to the movies from many places, creating many stories because we are a very diverse country.
is heard in or open body a phrase that fascinates me: “We all believe what we need to believe.”
The film also talks about the extreme capacity and need to create stories to explain the world: the protagonist has one story and the townspeople have another and, perhaps, the story of the universe is more susceptible to deciphering the complexity of the universe. the neighbors. Because sometimes archaic structures have the capacity to integrate into the system behaviors that are contrary to the norm.
A Raia, the border between Galicia and Portugal, is the setting for the film. As a co-production, you have skipped it.
Yes, of course, to roll. But in the story, the idea is that you don’t know where you are: it’s a limbo between two countries and between life and death.
Any project you already have in hand, fiction or documentary?
I think I’m going to stay in fiction and genre. She has got me!