Specializing in feminine protagonists, Spanish director Elena López Riera shies away from previous tropes of promiscuity, need, and the sealed fates they sometimes dictate in her first characteristic movie, “El Agua.”
Bought by Adeline Fontan-Tessau-headed Elle Driver for worldwide and distributed in Spain by Filmin (“Lucas”) and producer Maria Zamora and distributor Enrique Costa’s Elastica Movies (“Alcarrès”), the movie retains one foot planted firmly in actuality, utilizing discovered and documentary-style footage dispersed all through to spotlight a uncooked narrative. The opposite foot loosely traces the boundaries of ominous lore that’s woven by way of the narrative like superb thread, ever-beneath the floor of scenes coping with younger love, sturdy female bonds, and the urge to flee all of it and start anew.
“El Agua” is a co-production between Switzerland’s Alina FIlms (“Azor”), Spain’s Suica Movies (“Lobster Soup”) and France’s Les Movies du Worso (“Tumbuktu”), together with Swiss public broadcaster Radio Télévision Suisse.
Forward of the movie’s world premiere at Cannes’ Administrators’ Fortnight on Friday, López Riera, whose beforehand launched quick movie “Pueblo” debuted at the competition in 2015, spoke with Selection about mysticism and her strategy to cinema.
The movie touches on the destiny that’s bestowed upon us, the destiny we place on ourselves. Do you imagine folks can escape their destiny?
I hope so. I’ve at all times been very on this thought of future as a result of I imagine that, in the collective creativeness, it features as an inner mechanism with which many individuals justify their actions, or fairly, their non-actions, their immobility. In the movie we’ve tried to show this concept of future on its head, and attempt to strategy it extra as a notion by way of which society tries to impose sure behaviors, particularly in the case of ladies. Since time immemorial, future has been used as a software to inflict concern, to repress wishes, to just accept a longtime social construction, by way of legends, beliefs and in style tales. With the movie we wished to ask this similar query: Is it doable, if it existed, to flee our future? The reply lies in the foremost character, a younger lady who will attempt, regardless of all the pieces, to rewrite her personal story.
Are you able to communicate to how mythologies take root and change into the fiber of communities, handed on for generations?
I really feel that mythology has been, and continues to be, a vital half of the collective creativeness, as a result of, by way of them, emotions and ideas which can be vital for a component of society are crystallized. And I firmly imagine that mythology is just not one thing primitive or that needs to be associated to distant societies,. In the modern world, in large cities, mythologies are additionally consistently being created, simply have a look at the rise of astrology in current occasions. We’d like one thing else to imagine in.
Cinematically, “El agua” permits the viewer to really feel the time, the languid summer season warmth, the anxious uncertainty of past love. How did you obtain this whereas filming?
The thought was exactly that, to pay extra consideration to the hanging moments than to the actions, to underline the suspended time of the summer season, the feeling of no future that exists amongst the younger folks of that space. For this we labored for a very long time with the DOP Giuseppe Truppi and with the creative advisor and scriptwriter, Philippe Azoury, in addition to with the creative designer, Miguel Ángel Rebollo, when it got here to picking the locations, the occasions and the digicam framing. The thought was to be as shut as doable to the actors’ our bodies and to confront them with the actuality of a rugged territory, scorched by the summer season and enveloped in the electrical ambiance earlier than an enormous storm. It was additionally vital for me to work with a really small crew (we have been by no means greater than 10 folks on the set), which allowed the actors to be happy. The premise was at all times to work fiction as if it have been a documentary, documentary as if it have been fiction.
Are you able to discuss to your use of documentary-style scenes to advance the narrative?
For me it’s troublesome to make a distinction between actuality and fiction, maybe as a result of of my schooling, the means the ladies of my village taught me to inform tales. It’s the similar with cinema. I come from documentary cinema, at the very least from a means of filming and approaching actuality in a really quick, very visceral means. For this movie, it was vital to place every kind of registers on the similar degree: Documentary, fictional, archive, photos from social networks, as a result of for me all photos have the similar worth, and that is one thing we work on exactly with my editor, Raphaël Lefèvre. In the particular case of the ladies who communicate to the digicam and who inform us fragments of the fable, it was vital to make use of a traditional documentary register, a bit old fashioned like speaking heads, to spotlight their phrases in the most direct and trustworthy means doable.
