The Seville European Film Festival premieres in our country The Year of the Discovery, a journey into the paradoxical Spain of 1992 that revolves around non-fiction and essay
The event also hosts the Spanish premiere of The Art of Return, starring Macarena Garcia
Two Spanish films will be premiering nationally at the Seville Film Festival. One of the most eagerly awaited titles in the Official Section is The Year of the Discovery, the new feature film by Luis López Carrasco (Murcia, 1981), which arrives in Seville after winning awards in Rotterdam, Jeonju and Cinéma du Réel, where it led the list of winners. After his celebrated El Futuro, the director and screenwriter wanted to move towards "diametrically opposed thematic areas, I didn't know if it was the rural, the urban periphery or the industrial districts". In that search process, he became interested in the industrial reconversion of the 90s, but it was "the memory of seeing the Parliament of my autonomous community, Murcia, burning at the age of 11" that led him to this film.
An image that according to the filmmaker "no one remembers", linked to the workers' revolt in Cartagena and the Union, in the same year that the celebration is in full swing with the Barcelona Olympics and the Expo in Seville". López Carrasco, founder of the influential collective Los Hijos, explained that this contrast made him " question the memory we have given ourselves as a society about what those events meant. There is something very contradictory, which I believe is dragging on until the present time, in which a part of the population is having the party of their life while for other territories (Cartagena, but also Gijón, Sagunto, Puerto Real, Ferrol...) the 90's were the time of greatest desperation". In addition, he has recalled, that the fire of the Murcian parliament happened during the week in which the Treaty of Maastricht was signed. More contradictions.
The initial idea was to reconstruct the stories of that 1992 inside a bar. But, in this case, the work of documentation and interviews about the time and the choice of cast - real people - have gone almost in parallel. López Carrasco relied above all on the testimony and help of José Ibarra, a historian who was writing a book on that industrial crisis, who introduced them to other fellow unionists of that time. "There we realized that we wanted them as something more than a source," said the filmmaker, who used home video material and staged everything around that time: from the room and props to the protagonists themselves, who were characterized as if they were living in that historical moment again, "although what they are saying are their real stories. I sought to connect two crises, the one in 1992 and the one in 2008, through the personal stories of those who had lived through them. I was interested in that feeling of temporary friendship in which you don't know what happens in one era and what happens in the other".
The co-writer of The Year of Discovery, Raúl Liarte, has admitted that this film "was not an ordinary research process. It started by collecting experiences that would serve as the basis for possible fiction scenes, but then the process itself ended up becoming the film in some way. At one point, we felt that our ability as screenwriters would never be equal to the experiences of people who have lived through industrial reconversion, resistance to Franco, struggles for insubordination or against military service. We thought it was necessary for them to speak for themselves," he said.
Going back to frozen relationships
The Extraordinary Stories section, which the Seville Festival premieres this year as a source of intimate narratives and human stories, hosts the Spanish premiere of The Art of Return. The only Spanish film present at the last Venice Film Festival, this is Pedro Collantes' first film (Madrid, 1984), a story where the protagonist's return to her origins, after a few years living abroad, leads her to face a series of reunions. "It is not autobiographical, but it speaks of an abstract sensation that I know well," said Collantes, who lived for several years in various countries such as Norway, Holland and Japan, before returning to Spain. "You are forced to put life in tune and return to relationships that have been frozen in time, looking for a new meaning".
Macarena Garcia (Ventajas de viajar en tren, Holy Camp!), winner of a Goya, plays here an actress who returns home after six years of making a living in New York. "Her career and her personality are very different from mine, but I can identify with many aspects, such as the difficulty of finding your place in the world or being aware that you have to make a difference," she said. The Madrid-based performer has stressed that hers is "a very well written character, a broken woman who has been searching for her path for years and is going through a very hard time, even though it may seem the opposite".
Garcia said she analyzed the script for many hours. "It is a film where there is a lot of dialogue, but where almost everything happens behind those conversations. Even though apparently these are mundane conversations, for me it was important to show what was going on inside my character. The script moved me for that reason, all the roles let you glimpse a little bit more that is not evident".
Collantes is a scriptwriter and editor as well as a director, with a wide career as a short filmmaker. He has referred to the limitation of the time frame in which the story takes place, only 24 hours. The fact that it is a project financed by the Venice Biennale College program has motivated him to work "from the micro, the containment, shooting in a few days. That is why we found the key to telling this story through a series of long meetings or duologues. In the end, together they end up forming a kaleidoscopic vision of Macarena's character. I like the fact that she has been defined as an imperfect heroine, since somehow she is always renegotiating her view of her life through the eyes of others"