Lebanese director Mounia Akl and screenwriter Clara Roquet presented their first feature film, the Spanish co-production Costa Brava, Lebanon.
The Italian director comes to Seville with Il buco, winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Festival.
Seville, November 7 - On its third day, the 18th Seville European Film Festival was attended by the directors of two films competing for the Giraldillo de Oro (Golden Giraldillo). On the one hand, the Lebanese Mounia Akl, who brings to Seville her first feature film, Costa Brava, Lebanon. On the other, the Italian Michelangelo Frammartino, who with Il buco returns to direct a feature film, a decade after the revealing Le quattro volte (2010). Both have appeared at press conferences: in the case of Akl, accompanied by the screenwriter of the film, Clara Roquet from Barcelona (who is about to release her directorial debut, Libertad), and the producers Tono Folguera and Ariadna Dot. In the case of Frammartino, alongside screenwriter Giovanna Giuliani.
Mounia Akl: "When we shot, the reality in Lebanon was much worse than what we had imagined in our dystopian script".
A Lebanese family escapes the environmental crisis in Beirut by isolating themselves in the mountains, far from the pollution of the city. But the installation of a landfill next to their home threatens to break the intimate balance of this family unit. The plot premise of Costa Brava, Lebanon, Mounia Akl's debut feature, envisioned a dystopian near future that ended up looking too much like the reality we live in.
"When we wrote the film, we were thinking about the worst that could happen in the immediate future. Then, during the time we were writing and shooting, my country began to collapse: a severe economic crisis, the August explosions in Beirut, and the pandemic pushed us into extreme conditions. When we started filming, the reality in Lebanon was much worse than what we had ever imagined. We decided to let reality define the film. When I see it, it looks like a period film, because everything has improved since the shooting," explained Akl during the press conference. Along with the Spanish production company Lastor, Costa Brava, Lebanon had Carlos Marques-Marcet as editor and Clara Roquet on the script: "Clara and I met when we were studying together in New York, and we've been friends ever since. It is an honor that her film Libertad and mine travel together and with the same producers," Akl added. Roquet, for her part, pointed out that "we both share similar interests, such as our approach to family structures and female characters. We work a lot on building these family relationships.
The writing process, as Akl explained, took place in the village of Roquet, spending a few days with the screenwriter's family: "We were very inspired by the people around us, and I think we turned to our own parents: they are the people we love the most, but we are also very aware of their vulnerabilities, so they have been one of our main sources of inspiration".
Akl explained what they were looking at when searching for the perfect cast: "The casting process was interesting, mixing well-known performers, such as Nadine Labaki and Saleh Bakri, who play the parents, with unknown teenagers, and the grandmother, who had never played an actress before. We weren't looking for the perfect actors, but rather focused on building a family that was believable. We had to create bonds, and it was difficult because we had to do it by zoom, because of the pandemic. In Nadine Labaki's case, she put herself in my hands, she trusted me a lot. The fact that she is also a director allowed me to give her fewer indications, because she understood me in just a few words. She was able to let herself go and get lost in the character".
Regarding the collaboration with Carlos Marques-Marcet in the editing tasks, Mounia Akl laughingly commented that the director of 10,000 Km. and Los días que vendrán told her: "We assembled absolutely everything that was filmed, and then we started deciding everything that had to be removed in order to keep the emotional heart of the story. It wasn't easy because I never had enough perspective. It was very good to edit with Carlos and Cyril Aris, because as directors their view was very enriching and came from a place similar to my own vision".
Michelangelo Frammartino: "Il buco is defined on the border between the known and the unknown".
The Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Frammartino recreates in Il Buco the first expedition, dated 1961, to one of the deepest caves on the planet, known as the Bifurto Abyss, in the Pollino mountain system in Calabria. Featuring twelve young speleologists selected in a casting process to play their predecessors and repeat their feat equipped with climbing gadgets from six decades ago, Il Buco disregards dialogue and conventional narrative lines, and plays on the dramatic impact of the proposed journey through time, which can sometimes be mistaken for documentary filmmaking, in addition to the spectacular nature of its images. It also explores the North-South, evolution-tradition, urban-rural clashes in a production that won the Special Jury Prize at the last Venice Film Festival.
At a press conference at the Seville Festival, the Italian filmmaker highlighted the keys to Il buco: "The film is defined on the border between the known and the unknown, and that cannot be done on land, where everything has already been explored. On the contrary, in speleology we can find an absolutely unknown universe. Even more so in a place like the Bifurto Abyss, which was not discovered until 1961, at a time when Europe was experiencing an economic renaissance and new technologies such as television arrived, the cities were illuminated, and there was a certain sense of well-being. And a place like that cave became very powerful".
With Il buco, Frammartino maintains his vocation to delve into projects in the first person: "My projects are always born from my direct confrontations with places and people, with the sentimental ties I create with them. If there is no relationship of affection, the project fails. Giovanna and I have written a very material film, and writing it meant living in that cave. So we used all the equipment to go down into the grotto, becoming part of the film crew that went down, because even though it was dangerous for us it was essential to be in the heart of that place. The physical experience I was talking about. I only lost my fear when we were almost a year into the project and descending into the cave".
One of the most remarkable elements of Il buco is how it was shot in the midst of darkness: "My intention was to work in absolute black, there you create a border between what you can see and what you can imagine," explained the director, in order to continue reflecting on how that darkness has usually been treated in cinema: "There is a film by Max Ophüls, The Pleasure, which begins in darkness with the voice of a narrator who says: "it's as if I were sitting with you". This dimension of fusion was fundamental to the film. When the speleologists enter a cave, they merge with the mountain, they become part of it. I like to think that in my film that will happen to the viewers, they will merge with the black."
