2023-08-05 00:11:05
El Prat, in the Llobregat River delta, known for its large international airport, developed as one of those commuter towns in the industrial belt of Barcelona: the successive waves of emigrants from southern Spain their population quintupled between 1950 and 1975. Currently, it is still on the other side of the river, the train tracks, the ring road, and it is a territory that is not very visible in both art and fiction.
Born in 1989 and graduated from ESCAC, Laura Ferrs He belongs to one of those families: My grandfather was from Extremadura, my grandmother from Andalusia, and like so many others came to work in Catalonia, confirms by phone from Locarno (Switzerland), the festival of the very coffee growers where his first feature, The Permanent Image, will have its great world premiere this Sunday, competing for the prestigious Golden Leopard, the same trophy that Albert Serra won a decade ago with Historia de mi muerte.
Already from his short Los desheredados (2017), premiered in Cannes and awarded with the Goya among other trophies, Ferrs wanted to portray the city that had seen it grow, and very particularly the closure of his father’s bus company, Pere Ferrs, that I faced it recycling stoically as a chauffeur from limousines to cafes. Quite a role model, brimming with good humor and able to dance Joe Twilight’s My Dance Factory with a flair and flexibility few if ever had at her age.
The permanent image, inspired this time by the family of his maternal grandmother, starts in the Andaluca from the beginning of the 20th century, but most of it is developed again in the current Prat de Llobregat. It is also a much less grounded film in reality. Although interpreted by non-professional actors, as in the most authentic social cinema, they declaim their lines of dialogue in a very unnaturalistic way and the footage is organized as a series of vignettes, a priori unconnected, extremely aesthetically cared for, through complex compositions. flat, and dominated by an absurd humor.
I think that if you don’t let humor into your film, you can’t have a serious film, says the filmmaker, who doesn’t deny that costumbrismo that makes up our identity, although she does deconstruct it to embrace a new poetics far removed from the leaden social realism of lifetime. It is clear that, in everyday life, we have very banal obligations such as going to the supermarket, but If I have the opportunity to make a film, I prefer to have the luxury of being fanciful..
The Catalan director Laura Ferns.scar Fernndez Orengo
Social realism used to seem condescending and paternalistic to me. Although in my film, despite the fact that it is such an unnaturalistic proposal, there is still a social component. There is a political campaign and the protagonist, María Luengo, is commissioned to find authentic people, an adjective that is usually a euphemism for poverty, of low social extraction, even marginality. It is not that some people are more authentic than others, but that some have had fewer opportunities and that is why they have had to look for life. I give these characters the opportunity to live other things, to get out of the usual framework, he clarifies in an unusual claim for the authentically authentic.
Nor is it a directly autobiographical film, like many, no less remarkable, of those that have appeared directed by women in recent years, such as those of Carla Simn, Meritxell Colell or Celia Rico. I don’t really feel like talking about myself either, I already live with myself 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and it’s a subject that I can get bored of. In Los desheredados I already stayed on the sidelines, I limited myself to filming my father and my grandmother, here there are hardly any things left from my maternal grandmother, like her songs.
Republican songs that, luckily, we recorded before he died, when he already had Alzheimer’s, because you can’t find them anywhere anymore. She sang in a totally amateurish way while she worked in the fields or took care of her many siblings. I grew up with her, and throughout my childhood I heard her sing, without understanding the connection to a time that, like many people of his generation, he did not like to talk about. In the film I have put them in the mouths of the characters, she explains about the biographical traces.
The film has just begun its international journey, and it still does not have a release date in Spain, but it already represents a breath of fresh air. It would be close to the Chema García Ibarra or Ainhoa Rodrguez cinema, where experiment affectionately and humorously with the cato which will be added a few touches by Carlos Vermut (Magical Girl), who helped her make important decisions when the script was almost finished.
Although Ferrs is a cinphila, she confesses that her inspiration comes from many different sources: Like the songA Day in the Lifeby The Beatles, because it fascinates me that it starts in one way and then it seems to be destroyed so that another song appears, like in the movie; the novel the savage detectivesof Roberto Bolao, which is also divided into parts and has many stories within other stories, or the play Top Girls, by Caryl Churchill, which takes place within the framework of a company like that of the newcomer María Luengo’s character. Although she is a casting director for an advertising agency, as I myself was for a while.
The mixture between a delirium that is bordering on surreal, or even psychotronic, and anthropological realism -let’s call it- works, and sometimes it is 100% real, although it doesn’t seem like it: In the first part, it appears an advertisement for Bayer pills with the Virgen del Carmen, and I think people may think we made it up, but it’s real. At that time, Catholicism dominated, and was later replaced by the religion of the market. Now it is The Permanent Image that takes flight. But Ferrs is already dreaming of what could be his next film: A lot of amateur ornithologists come to the Delta: they all dress in beige, à la Colonel Tapioca, to watch the birds. There are also those who, in another part of the park, come to observe the planes. All models, brands and schedules are known.
I hope it doesn’t take him another five years to get it up.
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