Meritxell Colell: "I haven't been able to say goodbye to three very important people in my life"

BarcelonaAfter rediscovering family roots in Con el viento (2018) and stirring the flames of passion in Dúo (2022), Meritxell Colell (Barcelona, 1983) explores the wounds of exile and the pain of loss in Lejos de los árboles, the film she premieres this Thursday in the competition of the prestigious Locarno Festival. Through the journey of a Mexican sound artist and her Peruvian guide, Colell mixes temporality and genre in an almost fractal narrative about absence; undoubtedly, her most well-rounded, ambitious, and complex film.

When the protagonist of Lejos de los árboles is asked if she misses Mexico, she shifts and replies: “It’s complicated”. The film precisely allows itself to explore how complicated it sometimes is to talk about exile and its impact on identity. What leads her to explore the theme?

— Displacement and hybrid identities are central issues in all my films. We are all sketched in some way, there are no longer pure identities, especially in this era of miscegenation where everyone has had to move at some point. But what seems very strong to me about exile is that it becomes your identity, what defines you and those who come after. I wanted to talk about the complexity of contemporary identities and about not being able to say goodbye, and I decided to make a film with a sound artist, Latin American and displaced. And searching on the internet, three came up, one of whom was Angélica Castelló, who was a sound artist, granddaughter of a republican exile and, moreover, was born in Mexico but has been living in Vienna for 22 years.

Sound artist, Latin American, and displaced. A very specific typology.

— Finding Angélica was like a dream, because part of her work was to weave sculptures and installations with magnetic tapes. In Dúo I had learned that there was an Inca writing system called quipus, and I thought it would be nice to do something similar but sonorous when Angélica appeared. There are films that you make because you know someone in whom it resonates, and you can no longer stop pulling a thread that unites a lot of images and gives shape to the story.

And why do you think your cinema is always built around these collaborations with artists? It already happened in your first two films with the dancer and choreographer Mónica García, and here with Angélica Castelló, who in addition to starring in the film and inspiring the character, also signs the soundtrack.

— It's just that when you start, you can't stop. I've come to the conclusion that my films will always have collaboration with creators in common, and it seems precious to me, an infinite field of learning. And when you dialogue with someone else, the result is much richer because you get out of yourself. I am not an interesting person, nor is my environment; I am not interested in making autobiographical cinema. So, when you are lucky enough to find interesting people on many levels like Mónica or Angélica, who accumulate a great deal of life experience and have lived through complex situations, dialogue is like a game. I no longer have to think of a story and then cast and shoehorn these people into a role, but rather we organically create a character through dialogue.

When she says she's not interested in making autobiographical cinema, I think it's curious that, being such good friends with Carla Simón and both sharing a very similar view on cinema, the films and methodologies of both are very different.Carla Simón and sharing a very similar view on cinema, the films and methodologies of both are very different.

— Yes, but in essence we are very close. She starts from what is autobiographical to create fictions that have nothing to do with her life, and I start from very distant places to end up doing something very close to my reality. Although very different, Carla's cinema and mine dialogue in many ways. I also need it to have very personal elements, but I don't need to start from there. It took me a long time to understand it, but Lejos de los árboles is also very much mine. My grandfather and my great-uncle were from the Baby Boom generation. My grandfather never spoke about the war, and my great-uncle spoke about it only once, and never again. And in the end, the film is about that and about the images they left from the Republic.

There are moments when the film seems like a farewell. Who is saying goodbye with Lejos de los árboles?

— I don't know if the film is a farewell or the consciousness of a farewell that didn't happen. I haven't been able to say goodbye to three very important people in my life. The first was my grandfather, who died in Lleida and we didn't arrive in time. The second is Dolors Vilanova, a teacher at the school in Bordils, who died in an accident while I was on the festival circuit with Con el viento. When they held a ceremony at the school to bid her farewell, I was in Chicago and I was very sorry not to be there. And the third death was my grandfather's wife, who died of covid just as I was returning from the filming of Dúo, and I couldn't say goodbye to her nor even see her body. It was a subject that haunted me and I felt I had to talk about it, because it is extremely painful. And if we add to that the issue of the Civil War, where there are also mass graves... The film was the impossible journey: to meet in dreams someone you couldn't say goodbye to. And to make cinema this space for meeting.

Incorporates archival material from the Catalan exile in Mexico, from images of the Morelia children until the personal files of Avel·lí Artís-Gener (Tísner) and Pere Calders.

— For me it was very important that personal memory connected with collective memory. And the way we found to talk about all this was through family archives of Republican exile families. We contacted Glòria Calders, Pere Calders' daughter, and Arcadi, who is the grandson of one of Tísner's sisters, and we accessed their archives.

And how was this file?

— Basically they were films. Both Tísner and Calders were filmmakers, and in their correspondence, which is precious, the desire to have made audiovisual things often appears, but in Mexico they didn't find a way to do it: Tísner always went broke or something happened to him. And the archive of the arrival of the children from Morelia seemed fundamental to me. No matter how fictional a film is, the historical context must be there. Furthermore, the images of the ship have been seen a lot, but those of the crowd receiving the children with flowers are almost unseen and very impactful. In the times we live in, they make us think about how we welcome and what this welcome implies.

The fictional part is articulated through the protagonist's trip to Peru to create a sound map of endangered languages. And a certain analogy is established between her fascination with Quechua and the evocation of the Catalan spoken by her grandfather.

— It aims to be a tribute to minority and minoritized languages. When speaking with exiled families, you could see the great need to preserve and transmit Catalan that the people who went into exile had. In the case of grandchildren, there is great pride in those who speak it, and in those who do not speak it, great pain for the loss. Being a European filmmaker from Spanish territory making a Latin American film, the least I could do was talk about linguicide and the after-effects of colonialism. The film is a plea for multilingualism and the possibility of understanding without needing to know exactly the word they are telling you.

The film underlines that there are bonds that can only be expressed emotionally through shared language.

— Exactly. It's what happens when you migrate and learn languages, that your life is transformed and you end up forgetting that language that was fundamental for your grandparents and that was absolutely present in your childhood.

The protagonist also transforms through the relationship with the guide, without ever falling into the clichés of conventional cinema.

— I thought a lot about Dersu Uzala (Akira Kurosawa, 1975) to shape this relationship. There is always a class difference between the guide and the guided person, but also resonances and approximations. I want to think that the two people see each other transformed by the other. I met Lucho in 2022, when I took a documentation trip, and we did an initial screening thinking that perhaps we could incorporate him as an actor. And a large part of the film is born from our relationship and conversations.

A With the wind he still worked with professional actors, but with each film it's as if he stripped his cinema a little more of industrial conventions. Is it a path of no return?

— Each film is a universe. In Lejos de los árboles there is Teresa Sánchez, who is a beast I would love to work with again. But what interests me is making portraits of people, and when you fall in love with or are fascinated by someone, nothing else matters. It doesn't matter if they are a professional actor or someone acting for the first time. I always look for people who have a huge desire to make the film, and when you make a film for the first time, it usually happens that there is absolute dedication and generosity. When we become professional, both on and off screen, this is a little bit lost.

The scene that opens Lejos de los árboles culminates with a girl looking at the camera. The one that closes the film, with the same girl listening. The film's journey is similar, a journey from image to sound. Was it intentional?

— Yes. In fact, in the image of the girl looking at the camera, a song by Ovidi Montllor is already playing, which speaks precisely of seeing and listening. Ending with a girl listening was important because memory passes through listening. If we don't listen, we don't remember. I make films because cinema allows us to listen, and it's not easy to do so in daily life. I wanted to make a film that could be listened to, that would continue to work if we closed our eyes. I like cinema to open up a dimension that goes beyond the visual.

In fact, in his cinema, the search for a visual and sound language to express a fabric of emotions is more important than the need to tell a story. This is not very common in Catalan cinema. Do you miss poetry in today's cinema?

— Yes. But in general I miss poetry everywhere. Poetry is relegated to a kind of elitist circuit, but I have been passionate about it since I was little. Cinema should not be so closed off to prose, but rather explore those spaces that allow for suspensions and bifurcations. I am interested in films that escape linearity and are not subject to Hollywood law. Incredible things were done in the avant-garde of the 20s and 30s.

Far from the trees is also the title of a mythical documentary by Jacint Esteva from 1972. Why has he given it the same title?

— It was unconscious. I put the title very early on, when I was writing. And suddenly I said: “Wow, it's Jacint Esteva's title!” A film that marked me a lot, too. Time passed and I couldn't bring myself to change the title, and a moment came when I embraced it. If the title arose unconsciously, it's because I have it deep inside. And it was a beautiful tribute to someone so important to the history of Spanish cinema but who sometimes seems forgotten.

The filming in Argentina of her previous fiction, Dúo, was left unfinished due to the pandemic, and that marked the film. In Lejos de los árboles, on the other hand, it seems she has been able to film everything she had in mind, and with more budget, time, and richness of registers and textures. Has she gotten over the disappointment of Dúo?

— If I make Lejos de los árboles and return to Latin America, it's to get rid of the thorn of Dúo, which I couldn't do as I wanted. Lejos de los árboles, on the other hand, I enjoyed a lot. I was lucky enough to work with Mayca Sanz as producer. It was Carla [Simón]'s idea, by the way; she thought she was the ideal person, and she was not mistaken. We have made a very cheap film, for less than a million, and at the same time I have done everything I wanted: I have shot for eight weeks in five different shoots, with a pregnancy in between... Cinema is very constrained by industrial conventions, but other forms are also possible where one arrives out of necessity, ambition, playfulness, experimentation, or madness.