Juan Sebastián Quebrada (Medellín, 36 years old) was studying film in Buenos Aires when his teenage brother, Juan Andrés, died after falling from a fifth floor in the middle of a party in Bogotá. In May 2014, Juan Sebastián was at his best: he was immersed in the filming of his first short film, after years of insecurities. "I was upstairs, with that fantasy of the Colombian who thinks he can't make a film and is making one," he recalls. Nearly a decade later, the pain of those days and the years that followed has given rise to a fictionalized version in The Other Son.
The film, Quebrada's first feature film, is one of the most successful Colombian dramas of the year and will be the country's candidate for the 2024 Goya Awards. It tells the story of Frederick and Simon, two brothers who resemble Sebastian and Andrew. The stories differ in that the roles are reversed: it is Simon, the eldest, who dies at a party. But the essence is the same. The protagonist is not the deceased brother, but the pain of the one who is alive and sees his parents fall apart. "You feel helpless," Quebrada said.
The director, who grew up in Bogota, explores the various ways to grieve. He points out that he and Federico opted for escapism, with the desire to study in France or the frenetic work to premiere Strange Days in Buenos Aires, respectively. They "betrayed" their siblings and left them behind—for a while, at least—so they could move on with their lives. Meanwhile, the character's mother and the director's mother clung to the memory of their deceased children. "It's become common to think that you have to mourn forever to honor the one who is leaving," says the filmmaker.
Juan Sebastián Quebrada, in Bogota.Santiago Mesa
Question. What was his brother like?
Answer. Juan Andrés was the most important person in the family. The youngest, the promise... It was the prettiest and the whitest, actually. As absurd as it sounds, one in this society sadly associates being whiter with an attribute. We are from the same parents, but it is as if he was born into another social class, with him we experienced the economic and cultural ascent. When he passed away, the feeling was that the center of the family had died.
Q. The film tells what it's like to be the son of a grieving mother. What was that like in your case?
A. You want your mom to protect you... But she can't, because her pain is more than yours. You feel helpless, which makes you helpless as well. It was distressing to see her getting lower and lower in the early years. I felt that the one who could hurt the most had died, that with someone else it would have been less serious, and that the survivors were not enough to repair a pain that was impossible to repair. But I also wanted to protect my parents, or at least not their lives.
Q. The other child shows very different ways of dealing with grief. The mother clings to the memory of her son, while the protagonist insists on moving on with his life...
A. It has become common in society to understand that, in the face of such great tragedies, you have to mourn eternally to honor the one who is leaving. Your most immediate feeling is how are you going to allow yourself to be okay in your life if someone so important is gone. I feel like the mom in the movie is trying to keep a loyalty to pain that is ultimately a self-destructive path. On the other hand, there is the betrayal in the character of Federico. He seeks escape and tries to betray his brother in order to continue living. It's normal and self-destructive, too. You want to make your life... making a movie, falling in love, having children.
Q. In the film, Federico gets close to his brother's ex-girlfriend. Is that betrayal?
A. It's my reading. The death of the eldest allows him to access things that he could not do before, to reach a terrain that he always dreamed of. From there, he can be with the brother's ex-girlfriend, Laura. And that's a betrayal, but it's a betrayal of life... A drive to move forward and feel the world with hope.
Q. Did he feel like he betrayed his brother?
A. I wasn't with my brother's girlfriend, but the grieving person feels that to move forward is to betray the dead.
Q. You were just studying in Buenos Aires and were about to release your first short film when Juan Andrés died. He was at his best...
A. I was filming, elated... in a very joy. And that's where my brother died, when I was upstairs, with that fantasy of the Colombian who thinks he can't make a film and is making one. I kept going anyway... I finished Strange Days and premiered it at Bafici [the Buenos Aires Film Festival], which was very nice. And I didn't want to talk about my brother when my mother brought it up. But once Bafici was over, the fall into the wells began.
Q. How did you go from escapism to wanting to make a film about what you experienced?
A. The whole last year in Argentina I was kind of on hiatus. I realized it when I came back after finishing Ten Strangers and started with The Treehouse. It was then that I began to grieve and that made me want to start writing. In The Treehouse I thought about what faggots I was doing, what I cared about these people [in that short film]. For some reason I knew that my brother's story was the subject I was really interested in.
Q. The protagonist of The Other Son is very his mother in one scene. What did your parents tell you when you told them about the movie?
A. They looked at the project without knowing much, a bit with that idea that "between now and I do it...". They saw me there, year after year... I guess for them it was just another stage of grief, they would think that was my way of coping. Obviously, the fear began when The Other Son became a reality. But they have respected the process very much, they never intervened.
Q. And when did they see it?
A. I was lucky enough to be seen at the San Sebastian Film Festival in September. In these spaces, it is not so much what you think that matters, but what happens around you with the emotions and reaction of others.
Q. The other son insinuates that Simon may have committed suicide. Why did you choose not to reach a conclusion on this?
A. I once read something about someone who died in a car accident, but actually wanted to kill himself. I thought it was very nice because the narrator said that this person allowed everyone to build their own story to make it easier to deal with life. I believe in that, that there are deaths that each person in the family can have a different story about. Death may not be such a closed thing, he died and that's it... It is a story that is in complete motion and can change from person to person. That's why I wanted it not to be so closed and that each character could interpret it differently.
Juan Sebastián Quebrada, on November 14, 2023.Santiago Mesa
Q. And what is the story you constructed about your brother's death?
A. The idea of the accident caused me a lot of panic because it generates chaos that takes away the meaning of the world. It's very hard because you lose an order, a logic. The idea of suicide, on the other hand, terrified me because I felt I needed to understand the reasons that led to that decision in order for me to save my life. For one simple reason: so that it wouldn't happen to me... Because we are of the same blood, we are children of the same thing. The thing is, you don't really know why. I'm never going to feel an absolute because my brother took the answers.
Q. Do you think suicide is still taboo in Colombia?
A. There is a trial. Something gets dirty, it's evidence of a problem that can't be hidden. In the end, it is also denied because a person who commits suicide obviously had a problem and begins to think about guilt. Schools, for example, feel it can affect their image.
Q. What were the difficulties of making your story into a film?
A. The challenge is that intimate cinema, the kind that looks inwards, is not easy to finance in Colombia. But at the same time there is something very nice that Franco Lolli, one of the producers, told me: that forces us to reach such a good and worked level of script that people have to give us the money, they can't say no. We have to write more and work harder if we want to make intimate cinema.
Q. The film is noteworthy, among other things, because it focuses on a well-to-do family in Bogotá and not on the armed conflict, like many of the successful films in the country. Why is intimate cinema difficult in Colombia?
A. Our cinema is still legitimized by Europe, which triumphs at festivals there. And it's almost as if Europeans have denied us the space to explore our psyche, the terrain of our mind. What they expect from a film of ours is that it is "very Colombian" and that implies that it narrates broader social problems... That it's about our neighbor who is a traqueto [drug trafficker] or that it reflects the violence of the armed conflict. For something more intimate, they prefer their cinema... something like a Philippe Garrel drama.
Q. But don't social problems also impact the psyche?
A. Yes. And there are films in which the external, like a kidnapping, can give rise to an internal consequence... But the personal is never the starting point. That is why a bourgeois drama, for example, is not expected. It's different from Europe, Argentina or Brazil. They don't need a kidnapping to narrate an internal problem.
Q. It must be frustrating for someone who bases his work on very personal experiences.
A. It happened to me when I did Strange Days... one festival told me that the love story was very good, but that it hadn't explored the context of the migratory problems that the characters faced because they were Colombians in Argentina. And I'm like, What if I don't want to explore that? What if I don't want to do sociology or narrate topics that I don't know in depth? On the other hand, they are pods that can make one stronger. They force you to work more on the scripts and mature the characters so that they can compete directly with the intimate cinema of the Europeans.
People with suicidal behaviors and their families can call these numbers enabled in different regions of Colombia.
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