Neus Ballús (Mollet del Vallès, Barcelona, 41 years old) prefers not to say too loudly that his third feature film,
Six days of current
, is a comedy until seeing how the public reacts to seeing it.
But the reality is that his new film experiment exudes humor, with three real plumbers acting as improvisational actors.
Valero's verbal incontinence takes a new victim in the immigrant Moha, his potential new co-worker who comes to replace Pep, wise, slow and on the verge of retirement.
The film, in which the director explores again in depth from the everyday, portrays its protagonists through the six days of botched work that give it its title.
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The look towards the other
It is likely that some spectators will become defensive at the first racist outburst, but this is what Ballús' proposal is about, that they hold on to the seat and, this time, look and listen to the other. She explains it herself in Locarno (Switzerland), whose film festival is screened from this Saturday to Monday. It is the first stop that is predicted to be an extensive international tour for the film, already selected to be in Toronto in September. “I wanted to talk about these prejudices that we activate and that make us judge someone immediately. My father is a plumber and he used to tell me many of the daily situations that he lived through. Through them I realized that, in certain circumstances, in very brief and intense encounters like yours, certain prejudices are useful because they save time.You speak to a housewife in one way and to an old man in another, he explained to me. But this energy saving has led us to a non-existence of the relationship between different people ”.
Valero, Moha and Pep (from left to right), protagonists of the social comedy 'Six days current'.
The filmmaker, who has already combined reality and fiction with non-professional actors in her first work,
La plaga
(2013), has invested a lot of time in the editing room to find this time the usual balances in her cinema, which are managed between lightness and depth, between the documentary and the fictional and between the experimental and the accessible.
“I could not find references for the comedy tone I was looking for, because realistic and social cinema of this style always approaches drama.
And in everyday life of course there is drama, but there is also a lot of humor, a lot of absurdity and a lot of tenderness.
If we are a little curious, we often see it on a day-to-day basis ”, he defends about this film, which is part of the International Contest, the main competitive section of the Swiss contest.
Improvisation without prejudice
As in previous jobs, the process took more than five years of work. After completing a casting selection process in which he met with more than 1,000 plumbers, he spent two years getting to know the three chosen ones, sharing with them weekly rehearsal and improvisation sessions so that, from their meetings, he wrote the script. . Once they had been trained to react to unexpected situations, they started a shoot that ran chronologically and was also based on surprise. They did not know what was going to be shot each day or with whom. Real breakdowns were prepared for them, through a plumber who was part of the art team, which they had to repair. “I asked them a very serious game, which is how children play. But without judging them. The premise was: 'everything you do is fine,' recalls the Catalan.“At the time of editing, I had more than 70 hours of material with the three of them, who are not trained in acting, creating their own dialogues on the fly. It is probably the hardest thing I have done in my life, because with that material there were millions of possible films ”.
The chemistry between the three and the interest they aroused in the director made them and not others were the three chosen.
“I needed to feel a kind of infatuation with a person that I was going to spend so much time with.
It does not mean that you like everything about him or her, but that it generates a curiosity that makes you want to know more.
Moha is a mystery, Pep is a treasure box and with Valero… I didn't agree on almost anything about him, but at the same time he made me laugh a lot.
And that duality had to be explored ”, says Ballús.
A moment from the social comedy 'Six ordinary days'.
Both the main trio and the message of the film are set in their natural environment, on the outskirts of the city of Barcelona where the balconies, one next to the other, immediately explain the notion of coexistence that this story wants to show. Relying on the spontaneous truth of these characters was a cure for her humility, she says herself: “It takes you away from that position of the filmmaker who imposes his wishes on some actors so that his film looks as he had planned. In this way, you have to include situations that you neither wanted nor imagined, but you have to accept that with them the result may be better ”.
Because, in reality, more than their own personality, what these non-actors show is a sum of experiences of those who are like them.
“It has been two years treating her insecurities every week and a very strong bond is created.
I have seen them cry, laugh, hug, fight ... I did not know if I was going to find funding so that this idea could be projected in a room, but they told me that all this made sense to them, that it was like a therapy that made them get out of the day of rehearsals as new ”, comments the director.
Conceived and produced in parallel to his previous work,
El viaje de Marta
, a fictional film in which a middle-class family travels on vacation to a
resort
from Senegal, shares with him an interest in exploring social differences.
“Homogeneous environments are very boring and very poor for me, I do not understand how the richness of difference can be a conflict, because I know that it is what drives you to learning and curiosity.
But I am aware that in the artistic and intellectual sphere we do not feel the threat of immigration and that it is very easy to give an opinion from this position, in which you are not afraid that nobody will take your job.
They are environments like the world of construction, and other professions of the working class, those that have been forced to coexist for a long time, those that hold the ladder to each other and those that have to depend on each other.
And it is they who have a lot to teach us in terms of diversity ”.
The hybrid advantage
The combination of fiction and reality in
Six Days Ordinary
is the same that has propelled the documentary genre in the last decade into broader circles, and in which Neus Ballús has participated in this time. The formula has consolidated recent Spanish cinema titles, such as
The Year of Discovery
and
Brave Flash
. Now they just need to be placed among the most viewed by the public, says the director. “The terrain of the hybrid is very fertile because what it does is add resources. But the originality that is rewarded at festivals or award ceremonies is the same that scares investors who are the ones who make the project happen and who want you to always continue doing what has already worked for you ”.
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