Carla Simón: ‘In Spain people use words like shame and criticism. But my parents were unfortunate ‘| Video

FThe reunion of amily in European cinema is always an unpleasant experience, in conflicts that range from anger (Louis Malle’s Milou in May) to impressive stability (Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen). There are also splatters of bad blood Sunday best in the films of Carla Simón, but the Spanish director has a rare gift: he makes you leave the movie with a new belief that being with family members and talking to them can really be a wonderful thing.

No filmmaker working in Europe today can turn birthday parties, garden parties or poolside picnics into vivid canvases of human virtues and vices like this 39-year-old star. Alcarras at the dirty dinner table that he is singing in his new film called Romería, Simón presides over family gatherings with details that other filmmakers would use in the way of acting or dancing.

One of the tricks Simón uses, he explains, is to make sure the actors only read the script once before the camera starts rolling, so they have to revise to fill in the gaps. They go with them to parties, walks and shopping, and if there are disagreements along the way, that’s great. The secret sauce, however, is ignoring WC Fields’s common advice and always work with children and animals.

“I don’t get tired of working with children,” he said.

Simón’s interest in freehand drawings of family life was undoubtedly enhanced by his background. Born in Barcelona in 1986, his father died when he was three and his mother when he was six. Both succumbed to Aids. He was 12 years old when his adoptive mother told him that his parents had developed an autoimmune disease due to drug abuse.

All of his first three movies were huge hits: Summer 1993, released in 2017tells the story of a six-year-old girl who moves to a foreign country to live with her aunt after her mother dies. Alcarràs of 2022 He lives in a Catalan community that grows peaches for his adoptive family. Thirdly, Pilgrimagemeaning “pilgrimage” in Spanish, he goes deep into the story of his birth parents who he never knew. Eighteen-year-old Marina goes to her relatives in Vigo, in northwestern Galicia, to get her biological father’s death certificate, which she needs to study filmmaking in Barcelona. The first impressions are warm, but the family is a room with dark corners and locks. “Why are you coming to see us now?”, his cruel grandfather advised him. “You don’t look like your mother.” His father, soon discovers that he died five years later than previously told – what happened this time?

The film is based on Simón’s trips to visit relatives in Madrid, Barcelona and Galicia. He said: “I wanted to do this journey out of curiosity, not out of anger or resentment. “A lot of films or stories about searching for where you came from come out of feeling abandoned—I didn’t want that, because I have a family through my adoptive parents.

In the film, the letters written by his late mother open the door to the time when his parents met and found love – for each other, the Atlantic Ocean and drugs. Simón explains that the letters are real. “He wrote to his friends and family when he was living in Vigo. His Catalan has many mistakes, because teaching Catalan was forbidden during the Franco regime.

The Spanish cinema has a history of producing films where child actors are at risk: Ana Torrent’s transformation as a young woman obsessed with the legend of Frankenstein in Víctor Erice’s 1973 film The Spirit of the Beehive is considered the most successful film for a young child, and Simón describes it as “a very important film for me”. But if the film was a veiled tale about a country tormented by the military dictator who ruled Spain until 1975, Romería explores the secondary trauma that broke out after the fall of Franco, during and The Spanish Revolution.

In times of change, Madrid gave birth to move, a counter-cultural movement that celebrated a lifestyle that was outlawed under military rule. “All these children who were brought up under Franco and religious oppression, suddenly freedom came and they accepted it”, says Simón. “They didn’t think too much about the future or the consequences of what they were trying to do. If the AIDS epidemic in many countries around the world was created as a community problem, in Spain it was closely linked to the global epidemic of heroin. Especially the ones that were most affected were the Basque Country, where the Eta gang smuggles the drug, and Galicia, which has a difficult to control coast that serves as an entry point. When we talk about this generation in Spain, sometimes people use words like shame and criticism, but I feel that this is unfair: people like my parents were unfortunate.

Between Romería there is a stylistic shift, from the Eurorealism he liked in his previous works to magical realism: there is a mysterious cat that you would expect to meet in a Miyazaki film, and an unforgettable dance number set to Vigo punk rocker’s Siniestro Total Bailaré Sobre Tumba Tumba pa Manda Pa Anu “These three films that I have made are like a cycle, because they all talk about my family, upbringing and birth.” But since I became a mother a few years ago, I feel that my place in the family has changed. His next film, he reveals, will be a flamenco musical.