Seville, November 8 - The festival today hosted the presentation of three titles from the New Waves Non-Fiction section: Magaluf Ghost Town, by Miguel Ángel Blanca, Wan Xia, by Silvia Rey and Canto Cósmico. Niño de Elche, by Marc Sempere and Leire Apellániz. At the beginning of the meeting, the four directors agreed on a reflection launched by Miguel Ángel Blanca: "Some years ago there was a somewhat tiresome debate among purists about what a documentary should be. But luckily we have got rid of that, in a moment of post-truth, post-post-truth, in which we all live a lie, a representation".
Miguel Ángel Blanca: "We wanted to pervert the documentary language and take it into other places".
With the hypnotic Magaluf Ghost Town, the former leader of the band Manos de Topo penetrates the bowels of the mediatic Balearic municipality, a favorite of low-cost binge tourism. Miguel Ángel Blanca flees from the usual sensationalism to dive into the very particular idiosyncrasy of a group of local inhabitants, in a human and ironic portrait, as extravagant as it is fascinating. The film arrives at the New Waves Non-Fiction section after winning an award at the Tesalonika Festival and passing through the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival.
"We went to Magaluf to find out if this balconing and fellatio contest was real or if we had the wrong idea. And we quickly realized that the most interesting thing was elsewhere: in those people who live with this kind of extreme tourism, in high season and also in low season, when Magaluf turns into a ghost town. We found people with the ability to resist in that context, building their own stories, sometimes being able to survive thanks to fiction. In fact, fiction runs throughout Magaluf: it looks like a television set, and the focus of the film is there, on that set, among the neon lights".
Blanca has commented that the edges of the film give it an almost Martian feel, and that they relate it to genres such as mystery or horror. "Why not break the same documentary language and not know if what we show is real or not? And there are some drifts towards fantastic cinema, towards mystery, suddenly the tourists are no longer tourists, they are vampires. This perversion of documentary language towards other places is interesting.
Marc Sempere and Leire Apellaniz: "Although it is technically unusual, we wanted to make a popular film for everyone".
Marc Sempere and Leire Apellaniz extend to the viewer their fascination for an unrepeatable creator in Canto Cósmico. Niño de Elche, a film that escapes from the usual portrait to talk not only about the artist's personality and work, but also about the shockwave he provokes in his wake. A look that allows one to understand the impact of this musician, to photograph the cultural moment that Spain is living, and to make a deep reflection on the role of tradition and heterodoxy in an art like flamenco, and on the capacity of acceptance of the most purists in the face of the innovative.
Marc Sempere has told the germ of the feature film: "The idea of making a film about Paco, but not in his individuality but in the number of voices that make him up. We wanted to make a film about Niño de Elche but without him being the protagonist. We were dealing with him and the friendship grew. The initial motivation was to know where this man comes from, and, for that, we had to know a lot about flamenco, we had to talk to thinkers like Pedro G. Romero, like Ramón Andrés, and we had to make a very strong musical journey. We grew alongside him, because when we started the project he was not yet so well known, and from all that coexistence the film came to the surface".
Leire Apellániz reflected on his incorporation to the project: "Marc had been working for three and a half years when I joined. He already brought a lot of recorded material, very disparate and very powerful, with a great knowledge of the character and his environment. From our incorporation, we made very clear formal decisions: there were not going to be interviews, there were not going to be talking busts, we were not going to record Paco on stage with an audience, nor with any instrument other than the guitar and his own voice. And the performances were going to be in sequence shots, to capture the real emotion. We wanted to portray all those voices that make up the character, showing what part of them incorporates Niño de Elche, to intuit or understand who he is". Apellániz concluded: "Although the film has an unusual, unconventional form, our intention was to reach all audiences, we wanted to make a popular film to enjoy, very exciting and beautiful".
Silvia Rey: " When we were shooting, I felt like I was in a David Lynch film".
Silvia Rey presented Wan Xia, an evolution of her award-winning short film of the same name and an unusual study of the usually hermetic Chinese communities in Spain, delving into issues such as the processes of adaptation to new cultures, emotional exiles or identity.
The filmmaker explained how the project was born: "I had the fantasy of filming the Chinese New Year and I met a Chinese masseuse who lived in the Madrid neighborhood of Usera. I went to the party and there were four cats, but you think you're going to stay until they throw you out. And not only did they not throw me out, but they went into a senior center and invited me to eat. I didn't speak Chinese and they didn't speak Spanish. When I saw myself at that party, with all the revelry, I told myself that I had to make this film, no matter what".
The filmmaker has recounted a process that involved, in a way, immersing herself in a world within another, in a delocalized China that normally cannot be accessed. "It's true that I was invited, but normally they are very hermetic, they don't answer almost anything. For me, that center was like being in real China. But when people who knew the country, or young Chinese, came, they told me that China no longer exists. They have done their best to preserve their space, taking care of the spaces of that time when they left the country, recreating some Maoist customs. Somehow they have remained halfway between China and Spain." .
Rey has also talked about the tone far from the sobriety of his film, breaking with some non-fiction keys. "Shooting in the Usera senior center I felt like I was in a David Lynch film. A whole bunch of elements that for a Westerner are shocking. And for the short film I invented a playful voice-over, which is quite different from the documentary genre. The film was a kind of mirror game: they make a performance of what they consider China to be, and at the same time I shoot the same thing: what I say China is about what they say China is. Somehow we felt like experimenting."
