The Spanish Levante has a difficult relationship with water. They live in fear of its absence, the dread of terrible droughts, and the transfer of a controversial river to irrigate their gardens. On the other hand, when it rains and cold drops fall, water becomes the worst enemy. It brings chaos, destruction and even death. On the distinctive side of this dichotomy, it is normal for even legends to revolve around it. This is a case collected by Elena Lopez Riera in her first film. waterAn impressive debut that competes with Cannes directors in two weeks and with which he conquered the festival.
He has already shown a unique and personal style in his short films in which onyx, real and city are poetically combined. Now he is expanding his world with the first film that bears no resemblance to what we normally see in Spanish cinema, waiting for the box office and the formulas for success in the battle of algorithms. Lopez Riera goes against the flow. Legend has it that the backbone of its history says that with every flood caused by a cold drop, Oriuella women disappear. That water will get into them and they will run away.
This is an excuse to tell the story of a young teenager who wants to run away from the city. Do not look like a mother, an appointed lonely woman, causing trouble. There is no future for him. Neither inside nor outside. Only as a mother and wife, as a generator of new generations that are still stuck there. Lopez Riera mixes fiction with oral history and places a group of women who tell the camera how they were told this legend as a child. Water is, first and foremost, a personal and distinct face towards rural and urban areas. Without paternity and demonization. He had an appearance when he decided to leave Oriuela to shoot a movie.
“I started filming because I left Oriuela and that was a good excuse to go home. I do not know, it’s Oriuela who forces me to make films if the films take me to Oriuela. Maybe it will end and I will close this chapter. And make a film in Madrid, no I know, I’m in a love-hate relationship with that place. I wanted to go, like a lot of people who grew up in a city in the 90s who wanted to see the world. “, – says the director from the two-day beach of Cannes directors, a few hours before the presentation of the film.
This relationship of love and hate makes him just as tough and beautiful. Without idealization and demonization, which was “fundamental” for him. “This is a question that I am interested in, but for me, it really is a question, ‘How do people look at me?’ The boy looks at me as if to say, “This is what’s happening.” And it’s very powerful. You come in and you think you are very smart, you are a cosmopolitan who is going to make a movie in the city and so the city is watching you because you are no longer from there, you go. And the pain when you go home and people look at you like a stranger is hard, but it also makes me wonder and that is why there is such a look. That I try not to idealize and demonize, that so much is said about the village, and that I am nervous that it is romanticized, that the villages are romanticized. Are how they help each other ‘. “Well, everything is like in the cities.”
ᲐRian, are present water As well as a portrait against hereditary and embedded machismo. Machismo, conveyed through legends that frighten young women not to go and be obedient because “the world is macho and therefore legends.” “Myths are created. Look at the madness that is now back with the horoscope. Myths respond to the crystallization of many things that society wants to maintain, such as roles, and legends are a very effective way to achieve this. “The wolf will eat you. It is not accidental that they fall back on a woman’s body to suppress her, or her wishes that they do not come out alone. This is a reflection of society,” explains Lopez Riera.
When he started this film, he realized that his despair, desire to leave, and fear of finding nothing outside, have been preserved from generation to generation, as if it were another legend. “What I’m interested in is seeing what changes from generation to generation, but above all, what does not change. It ‘s a repetitive gesture that you think you can do differently than your parents and grandparents. Generation.Two spent two years in a room with a computer.I think we do not know very well, but these are people who were 16. The elderly reached 18 without leaving the room.When making the film we realized that we could not ask questions about their future because their “The future is very short. It was reduced to three weeks before the next measures were approved. They did not know if they were going to take to the streets.”
A group of children he discovered during a very long casting process and was going in big bottles to look for people from the Vega Baja area. Beside her are Barbara Leni and Nive de Medina, the only professional actors in the group. The film, which is “Bobbin Lace” and was born from a man who describes himself as “quite unconscious”, but obviously we should try to do things personally: “Because I can not dream, turn off and go.” The dream took him to Cannes with the first film to show that Spanish copyright cinema is a unique moment.
Source: El Diario
