A filmic trompe l'oeil born from grandfather's tapes

In 2011 Nuria Giménez Lorang (Barcelona, ​​44 years old) accompanied her mother to dismantle her grandfather's house in Switzerland, who died at the age of 97.

In the basement he found "about 50 film reels, most of them 16mm, the rest 8mm."

She convinced her mother that she deserved to make room for them in the car - "and it is true that they occupy and weigh a lot", recalls the filmmaker -, suspecting that there was a treasure there.

"A Swiss basement is like a luxury hotel, the coils rested at ease."

And when he returned to Barcelona, ​​his intuition was confirmed.

Although for this they had to go through seven years of trial and error, of assembling and tracing that already digitized material.

“It has been a temple, a refuge of freedom, a universe in which I have done what I have wanted, and few times I have achieved it in the rest of the fields.

In seven years a lot has happened to me.

I would come home with shit from outside, like the death of my father or like you fall in love and fall out of love, and in those times my refuge was there.

It has been a playful experience, without a written script, a constant search and that not knowing caused me some anguish ”, says the filmmaker on a cold autumn morning in Madrid.

“And of course I was desperate.

Because I ran into dead ends, I wondered if it was worth it. "

Giménez Lorang began with short pieces, while writing down all the ideas that crossed his mind.

Thus it was giving birth to an artifact,

which some call a creation documentary, when in reality it is only a documentary that the images were filmed by someone who wanted to bear witness to happy moments.

As an Ortega event, the celluloid that has become the foundational clay of Giménez Lorang's work was a great film, but the circumstances were needed to complete it.

premiered at the 2019 Gijón festival (where it won three awards), it was screened at the Rotterdam festival, but the fan phenomenon emerged, already in a pandemic May, at the D'A Film Festival in Barcelona, ​​where its

projection

multiplied its echo: not only did it win the audience award, but the noise on social networks prompted its premiere today in commercial theaters in Spain.

Never cheat

"Although I have seen almost all the images [the tapes totaled more than 29 hours, which has ended up being reduced to 73 minutes] a hundred times, each time I have discovered something new, and I hope that the viewer will enjoy that playful side ”Reflects the filmmaker, who teaches the public a kind of film diary of a woman, Vivian Barrett, and her relationship with her husband, León, a businessman who loves speed and travel.

Barrett, from an idyllic place to an idyllic place, also lives fascinated by a guru writer of aphorisms (the texts that Giménez was writing during the editing), Paravadin Kanvar Kharjappali, which will mark her future.

All of this is shown in subtitles, while sound is reserved to create atmosphere.

The viewer sees happiness, with images of saturated colors, but reads a melodrama by John M. Stahl or Douglas Sirk.

"I do not play to cheat, but I present a game."

He invents sites, joins images from different times.

“You seem to be obsessed with filming, right?

No, that's me ”.

Because she confesses that where she reflects herself is in those texts.

“It is a very powerful tool for self-knowledge.

Vivian Barrett was born as a result of my thoughts and from a direct source, the images ”, and she continues straight away:“ I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but what I didn't: I didn't want ambient sound or voice-

, and I didn't want to tell the life of my grandparents.

I use their images, not their personal lives.

There was no moral doubt, and in short, I was going to lie yes or yes, whether I recounted their lives —because they had already died and were not a source of information— or fantasized about what was recorded. "

My mother, when she saw him, confirmed my bet, and told me: 'You have made a more accurate portrait of my parents than if you had told their real story.

My Mexican Bretzel

fables, flees from a personal point of view.

“As a spectator, I am not interested.

I take it for granted that each person who had received these tapes would have created a different film, and it would be interesting to see what conclusions they would reach, ”says Giménez Lorang.

And she uses herself as an example: “I have written 120 pages and I have only used five.

There are millions of possible plot lines ”.

How to suggest that what is shown is a virtual game like the ones in the

series

or that the marriage was a couple of spies - it must be recognized that some sequence exudes the aroma of old James Bond - or, even, "make a new montage in that the point of view was his ”.

Or as it reads on the screen: "If you film, you don't have to live."