Queer, racialized and migrant: the new Catalan cinema at the Berlinale

Special correspondent for the Berlin Film FestivalSomething is moving in the cinema being made in Catalonia, if we pay attention to the two Catalan short films that will premiere at the Berlinale which begins this Thursday: Almost September, by Lucia G. Romero, and Juanita, by Karen Joaquín and Uliane Tatit. And not because they are directed by young women, which is no longer a novelty in Catalan cinema, but because of the naturalness with which they deal with realities that fiction tends to problematize. Almost SeptemberFor example, the conflict in the protagonists' sexual-affective relationship does not arise from the fact that they are women or that one is racialized, but from the other's fear of abandonment. And that Juanita The fact that it is starred by a racialized teenager is a minor detail in the short's reflection on the cultural clash between the aesthetic stereotypes of a migrant family of Dominican origin and those of the host Catalan society.

For Romero, naturalness is the consequence of understanding cinema from experience and personal connection with the material. "I represent love in the way that I have experienced it, and it is with women," says the director, who does not want to underline the importance of the racialized aspect of the characters: "It is logical that the use of racialized characters is normalized now that racialized people are telling our stories. The use that we have in Spanish cinema is limited to women doing work." Romero, born in 1999 in Barcelona to a Catalan mother and a Cuban father, was already at the Berlinale last year with Healthy Care, his final year project on Chess, which won the Generation section award. "It was not only the premiere of the short, but also the first screening I had seen in the academic field," he still recalls with emotion. Almost September, his master's thesis, has entered the official section and will be nominated for the Golden Bear for best short film.

Romero's two shorts share the absence of the father figure and economic precariousness as a vital horizon. The protagonist of Almost September She lives with a negligent mother and three younger sisters in a bungalow in a campsite, the humblest place in a beach town dominated by large hotels. "Since 2015 it has been illegal to live in a campsite permanently, but while filming the short we discovered people who do it anyway," explains the director, interested in exploring how people inhabit "transitory spaces where, often due to economic necessity, microcosms are formed outside the hegemonic model of society." Showing these socioeconomic realities, always "as a context" because "it is not the central theme," also responds to a desire to represent what she knows well. "If I had not had a scholarship I would never have been able to study at Chess, and today I would surely not be making films," she says. "And I like to claim this because often only people from the upper class or upper-middle class make films. In fact, arriving at the school was a shock for me, because the context where my classmates came from was radically different, and they have diversified their view."

Latin beauty

Romero celebrates meeting Karen Joaquín, co-director of Berlin Juanita. They met at the Malaga Film Festival, where they were presenting their previous shorts. "I remember that I told her that, apart from me, she was the first black director I knew in Spain," explains Romero, "and we became very good friends." Joaquín is Dominican and came to Barcelona to study film at the Ecib school, like the other director of Juanita, Uliane Tatit, born in Brazil and trained as a journalist. The directors' experience as migrants is the inspiration for a short film about a 12-year-old Latina girl who wants to wear a bikini against the advice of her mother, a Dominican who imposes aesthetic values on her daughter that are out of tune with those of the host country, Catalonia.

"It's a story about the origin of the insecurities that can end up defining us," says Joaquín. "It has to do with us and the experience of migrating to Catalonia from a Latin culture, where people dress much more conservatively and it's never done." topless on the beach". Even in Brazil. "On the beach you can wear a thong, but outside it is frowned upon," Tatit concludes. The fact that Juanita speaks Catalan with her friends not only follows the logic of a real integration process ("she lives in Catalonia, it's normal for her to speak Catalan," Joaquín confirms), but also responds to her desire to be a rebel. Juanita will be screened these days in the Generation section of the Berlinale, the same one in which Healthy care was presented last year and was a success. Whatever happens this year, the three directors are already preparing feature-length fiction projects: Tatit about a Brazilian prostitute who is a victim of the pimping mafia in the so-called Carioca Case of Lugo, Joaquín a story about migration that will be shot in part in the Dominican Republic and Romero a new approach to the adolescent universe that is already being explored Healthy Care.