The movie about evictions you can go see with your children

BarcelonaEven before it is released, Olivia and the Invisible Earthquake It is already a milestone: it is the first Catalan animated feature film in stop-motion Made in Barcelona, it is the first film with this technique in Catalonia directed by a woman, the screenwriter, producer and director Irene Iborra. The film has also just celebrated its premiere within the competition at the Annecy Film Festival (France), the Mecca of animated cinema, and is guaranteed a theatrical release this fall.

The film adapts the successful young adult novel The movie of life (El Barco de Vapor, 2017), by Maite Carranza, who named the protagonist Olivia in honor of Iborra's daughter, because they had known each other since their screenwriting master's degree and had co-written a series of children's books together. The story tells the eviction for non-payment of the mortgage of a single-parent family and relocation to a bank-owned apartment in a poor and diverse suburban neighborhood. "Maite always writes with a strong connection to society, and this story moved me. I found it beautiful, delicate, very much about children and for children," explains the director, who had made short films in stop-motion and animation scripts.

A drama with a child's perspective

One of the attractions is that Olivia and the Invisible Earthquake addresses a complex and dramatic topic from the perspective of a 12-year-old girl who doesn't understand the move, nor her mother's despondency, nor can she fully accept that they are so poor that they have to go to the food bank. However, she does understand that she must pretend to the social worker so that the family isn't separated and that she must strive to make her little brother believe that it's all a fast-paced comedy. "The attitude she develops or is forced to find is the silver lining in the darkest hole. She lives between despair and innocence, because children don't have certain social conditions," reflects the director.

The little figures and their movements bring joy to a film in which imagination and fantasy also play a key role. "In the mother's case, it's like a kind of protective shield to keep her from sinking, and in the girl's case, we use metaphors that work very well, like the earthquake and the fall into the abyss, which is a space outside of reality, inside Olivia," explains the director. These solutions convey, in a very sensorial way, the anxiety that children must suffer when they find themselves in situations as extreme as losing their home.

For the director, the fact that it's not a white film is precisely the film's charm and, at the same time, its commercial risk. "I don't know if it's acceptable to tell children about the society we live in, with its chiaroscuros, even if it's not as stark as we would tell an adult. But since Maite wasn't afraid, neither was I," says Iborra. The film even has some specific references to social organizations like the PAH (National Human Rights Fund), the Pedranegra vulture fund, and realistic sets that are close to documentary. "It's an adventure film for all audiences, ages 8 and up, but adults should be prepared for all kinds of questions," the director warns. "I'd like people who see the film to feel that we're never alone, that there's always a human network you can connect with, and the strength of people coming together."

An award-winning benchmark

The clear reference was the Franco-Swiss film The Life of Zucchini (2016), a film in stop-motion about a child who ends up in a foster home, which was nominated for an Oscar and awarded the César, the European Film Awards and the San Sebastian Film Festival. "That gave me the push to think that a film about stop-motion here and with a tough story for children. Now we'll see what happens," says the director, who has had the co-production of four other studios here and four more from France, Belgium, Chile and Switzerland. In addition, two of the artists who signed that film and of the most recognized names in the world of animation (they have worked with Wes Anderson, Tim Burton and Guillermo del Toro) are: the British Tim Allen as godfather and collaborator.

The process until the premiere this Monday in Annecy has been long, laborious and expensive: the budget amounts to 4 million euros, approximately as The 47 and more than Alcarràs either House on fireThe technique involves not only the usual years of scriptwriting and development, but also a year of constructing the puppets and another year with an entire international team installed in a warehouse in Barcelona's Sant Martí neighborhood dedicated to filming the characters frame by frame within the miniature sets. They worked at a rate of four seconds per animator per day, about ten seconds of film per day. "The result is very good, comparable to any European production. It's a quantitative and qualitative leap," celebrates Iborra, a professor at the BAU school, which has been nurturing film specialists in this technique for ten years. "I'm happy to be paving the way, but it's a strange honor, because I think it's been very difficult for us. I hope more will follow me," says the director, who also admits that the difficulties of balancing motherhood with motherhood, the fact that it's a pioneering experience in Catalonia, and the high investment made by six parties have brought many fears into play. "Breaking glass ceilings leaves you scarred: it's been very hard," Iborra admitted days before the French premiere.