Carla Simón: “I wanted to understand my parents beyond being my parents.”

Special Envoy to CannesIt is still beautiful that Carla Simón (Barcelona, ​​​​1986) present Pilgrimage At the Cannes Film Festival, she was more than eight months pregnant, or as she herself says, "very pregnant and ready for whatever may happen," because the film is a daughter's love letter to parents she lost too early and of whom she barely has any memories. The third film by the director ofSummer 1993 and Alcarràs accompanies a Catalan teenager with the desire to study film on her trip to Galicia to meet her paternal family and the places where her parents' love story took place. Pilgrimage, who speaks Catalan, Spanish and Galician, once again demonstrates Simón's extraordinary talent for capturing the rhythms of life and the secret language of families, but in the second half of the film he also opens a new door in his cinema, a freer and more fantastic one that abandons the strict realism of his previous films.

What was the creative process that led you to want to make Pilgrimage?

— When I finished Summer 1993 I had two ideas on the table, Alcarràs and PilgrimageAt that moment Alcarràs It seemed like a very difficult challenge, because it was an ensemble film and I didn't know how to do it, but Pilgrimage It was even more so. And I think it was a good idea to have done so. Alcarràs before, because it's allowed me to challenge myself much more than I would have if we'd done it before. It's given me the opportunity to fly and try things that you don't dare to try in the first and second films.

For example?

— Basically, it's about getting out of your comfort zone. Pilgrimage It has a new structure, this episodic idea of getting to know one character and then the next, and also the use of dialogue, which I hadn't worked on much before. But above all, it's that break in the film, where at a certain point a new film begins when you thought it was about to end. It's not the naturalism I'd been working with until now, but rather a somewhat more poetic terrain.

In this sense, Pilgrimage It can be seen as a vindication of the ability to imagine the past of those who came before us.

— I passed the promotion ofSummer 1993 saying that when you don't have memories of someone, you can't generate them, and one day I said to myself: "Wait a minute, but I work in cinema, and cinema is precisely used to generate those images that don't exist, but that you'd like to see." I have very little family archive, but this film has given me the opportunity to put images into the history of my parents and the places they lived, which has given me a kind of peace. I've been able to create something about them that will remain and that my children will be able to understand later on.

You imagine your parents' past as sensual beings who laugh, dance, have sex, and take drugs, which is an unusual way to imagine one's own parents.

— This has to do with the era, which is intrinsically linked to freedom, from my father's love of sailing and the connotation of seascapes to how my parents relate to their bodies and to each other. The casting of the actors [newcomers Lucía García and Mitch] also gave me the opportunity to film them with that lack of bad smell. But above all, I wanted to understand my parents as characters beyond just being my parents.

A film has just been screened in Cannes, Alpha, by Julia Ducournau, which recovers the memory of the AIDS years, a theme that is also central in PilgrimageWhy do you think there's suddenly this need to talk about it?

— AIDS has evolved significantly medically, but not socially. There's still a lot of work to be done. Knowledge of it remains taboo, to the point that young people today don't know much about it because it's no longer talked about. The Transition was a happy period of freedom, but it also had a dark side with heroin. And between the heroin taboo and the AIDS taboo, a wall of pain was created in families, and they wanted to bury it despite not talking about it. And I feel that we have to talk about it, that this is also historical memory. My parents' generation is surprised when I openly explain that my parents died of AIDS, but those of us who are orphaned by this history have a need to bring it to light. And I've never judged my parents' story; rather, I was curious to understand it and embrace it. Of course, without romanticizing it, because it wasn't all flowers and violas.

The film opens and closes with an image of the protagonist filming with her camera. Is the search for your identity through the absence of your parents what made you a filmmaker?

— That's how I feel about it, yes. And it's funny, because the idea of her being a filmmaker wasn't in the first version of the script, but the moment it came about, the film gained another layer: telling how the desire to make films was born, which made perfect sense to me. Also, being a filmmaker, the character was more active and more interesting. But yes, the result is a film that speaks to my love of cinema.

And if this film really closes a trilogy of films about your family, what will your cinema be like from now on?

— It's a question that makes me a little dizzy, but not out of fear, but rather out of excitement about doing something new that I'd really like to do. I think that, right now, making films about my family again wouldn't take me to interesting places. And I feel like I'm starting a new era and that it makes sense to embrace whatever comes next, even if it's different, because in reality, each film should be different.