Carla Simon has almost no physical memory of her mother. as counted Summer of 1993Her wonderful feature debut when she was just a girl, her parents died of AIDS and she grew up with her uncle. Among the items she treasures are several photos of her pregnant naked mother. A post-natal body showing off beautifully, without shame. It fills in the rest of the shortcomings or perhaps imagines them. It recreates the family memory that every child has with their parents through art. With his films, he somehow returns to that absent mother.
This has been evident in all his previous works, but it becomes evident in the short film he presented at the Venice Film Festival on Authors’ Day. A letter to my mother for my son This is a wonderful story Carla Simon tells her newborn son. He does this to explain who the grandmother he won’t meet was. He didn’t know him well either, and that’s why in this poetic work he restores him with what he knows and fills in what he wants. Now she is a mother.
She was pregnant with her first child when she was offered a pair of shorts by the Miu Miu brand and worked by directors such as Agnes Varda or Lucrezia Martel, whom Carla Simon admires. She accepted the challenge and decided to write a delicate reflection on motherhood and absence. He addresses the symbolic for the first time, but always with the gaze that characterizes and moves him. A story in the rhythm of Lole and Manuel, which begins with her posing naked, taking the same photos as her mother. Simone gives her son souvenirs she invented because “this family memory that is missing when you don’t have it, you have to invent it to tell yourself,” says Simone from Venice with little Manel a few meters away.
The sentence briefly summarizes the director’s cinema. “I make films to imagine you, or to imagine myself”, the certainty and doubt that “it has always been”. “I think the need to tell stories comes from the fact that there are many stories in my family, but also because of my childhood, because that story is missing,” he says, recalling that in the short film this sentence ends with the fact that maybe he makes films because he doesn’t want to die: “That’s what I realized later. I think about it and I realize that I am very afraid of death and look that I had to live it close. I think a lot of times we artists do or create because of the fear we have of dying, that leaving a mark can seem very self-centered, but well, there’s something there.”
A half-hour short film in which Angela Molina becomes the imaginary mother who even talks to the real Carla, pregnant, and realizes that “pregnancy is a very beastly thing, very wild, very powerful, very primitive” that forced her to accept it. These photos and shoot in Super 8.
Now is the time to think about the future. You have to see it firstI Alcaraz He is the one chosen by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to represent Spain at the Oscars. If so, it’s time to promote the film in light of a possible Hollywood nomination. Then focus on the third draft, which has already been written, and in which he continues to delve into the family’s memory. It looks like she’ll have to wait a bit, doesn’t want to give up on enjoying motherhood and says she’ll be meeting with her producer Maria Zamora soon to talk dates.
“Now I realize that the birth was only the first. I want to see him grow up, take care of him, educate him and also do well, do it calmly. We had the idea of ​​shooting next summer, and now it seems a little early, mainly because I can’t sleep, and suddenly the idea of ​​finding that space seems far-fetched. Let’s see. For me Alcaraz It showed us that it’s okay to take things slow because no one is waiting for your film and it turns out better, let’s see if we slow down a bit. I don’t know if it’s a whole year, but a few months, for sure, because it really gives us a chance to get better, and also because the baby’s brain is only half functioning in the first few months. The shyness that characterizes him.
Source: El Diario
