Carlos Saura's fear of another civil war

Carlos Saura and his daughter Anna, at the door of the María Cristina hotel, in San Sebastián.VINCENT WEST / Reuters

Among the madding crowd that accompanies any film festival, the presence of Carlos Saura (Huesca, 89 years old) in San Sebastián tempers the maelstrom. Until he starts talking about his future trips and projects, about his premieres. At the Zinemaldia, his short film

which illustrates the song of José Antonio Labordeta through photographs turned into drawings, images that its author has baptized as photosaurs, will

be screened at the opening gala

. That same technique has served him to develop another short film,

which after its premiere last week at the Prado Museum will be screened in October at the Sitges festival, where Saura will receive the Grand Honorary Award. And also the launch of

begins

another of his musical feature films, in this case focused on popular and traditional Mexican music through a small plot;

The film will pass through the Seminci in Valladolid and the Guadalajara (Mexico) festival, where it was filmed, before hitting commercial theaters on November 12.

And to all those events the filmmaker will go.

More information

• Carlos Saura: "I have lived through the war and I am terrified that there is another in Spain"

• The May 3 shootings come to life

In San Sebastián his

transports the viewer to the childhood memories of Saura, who was powerfully marked by death, desolation and the suffering of the Civil War. “Labordeta's song talks about things that I have lived through,” he tells three journalists sitting next to him and that of his young daughter Anna, producer of the short film, and current right-hand man of the filmmaker. "That priest, those bombings, those murders, makes me identify with the issue." The creator confesses that the work has served him “to exorcise those memories”. And he assures: “The Civil War has not yet been adequately dealt with in the cinema. If anything, a little bit. Many of mine speak of those years, right. But they are missing. My current fear is that that confrontation will happen again in Spain. Because of the conflicts that exist between the parties, because of the violence that is expressed orally ... It scares me.We haven't learned anything. It seems incredible how we repeat the same mistakes. And that possibility of a new Civil War is not so far away ”.

image of 'Rosa, rosae', by Carlos Saura.

Passionate about photography, in his works in this art in the fifties "the famine, the pain that was born of the previous times were already reflected".

And there he enters to reflect on violence in the human being.

“I am now working on the origins of art, with many people, such as Juan Luis Arsuaga or the cartoonist Pedro Saura, an expert on the Paleolithic.

And with them I am exploring caves, seeing rock art, with which I have discovered that man does not stop fighting.

Violence is innate to the human being.

It may come from our mammalian side, from our part of wild animals. "

But isn't Spain a particularly Cainite country?

“That was Unamuno saying, right?

I don't think so, we are not very different from other European countries.

I don't believe in those great words, especially the biblical ones, which come from a book full of violence, something disturbing ”.

Image of 'Rosa, rosae'.

Every day the filmmaker watches a couple of movies.

"I go to bed very late, almost at three in the morning, and I see everything: the good and the bad," he acknowledges.

“I have already turned the catalog of Netflix, Amazon and Movistar.

The ones that I don't like also because that's how I see and learn what I don't want to do.

What I want to do?

I don't know, what I have clear is what I don't want to do ”.

Saura talks about his next projects. Someone stranded, like a film about Felipe II, adapt his novel

about the Civil War (which was born as a script) or a continuation of

The television series about Lorca is better, although he does not want to enter into the statements made from Vox, when they assured that Lorca would vote for them because he loved Spain. “I prefer not to continue there, because it would make me very nervous. I did not know much about Lorca, and I have enjoyed discovering a charismatic, humanistic, affectionate guy ”, he explains. “I think it was Dámaso Alonso who said that when Lorca entered a place it was neither hot nor cold, it was Lorca. In short, he is a character to study in depth, an example of a paradigm of what the Civil War was ". On the past he confesses that he does not see his movies. "They force me to see them again because I go to their presentations, if not ...". Of course, he confesses "a lucky person, who has directed some 50 films and who has made the cinema he wanted to do, and that is a miracle." That which,she laughs: “And I have had seven children, and Anna who is by my side and is wonderful. Hey, if I die tomorrow, that's it ”.