‘Espíritu sagrado’, Chema García Ibarra’s stimulating debut feature (Elche, 1980), is giving a lot to talk about. He began his career with the award-winning short film ‘The attack of the Nebula-5 robots’, a cult work shot among family and friends that already pointed out ways and toured numerous festivals. This restless filmmaker does not like to work with professional actors, he seeks humor and drama in the natural, in misfit characters who face reality by escaping as they can, including the belief in the existence of beings that come from other worlds. We are talking about a risky, free and personal cinema that skillfully manages to distill the extraordinary from the everyday. A tragicomedy rich in ideas that generates atmospheres as exceptional as they are disconcerting. A good opportunity to taste a different cinema, which fortunately exists, of people and sensations, on a billboard open – luckily – to the unusual.
-The success of your first short, did it mark your style as an author?
-The first success of that short was to do it, finish it, watch it, and that I really like it. I started to think about what I wanted to explore, something related to the gestures of the actors that I had not anticipated, that had been generated spontaneously by the fact that they were non-professional actors. And since then I continue with that exploration.
-The journey to build your first film is usually long …
– I have been lucky to always make the film that I have wanted to do. As soon as the script for ‘Espíritu Sagrado’ was finished, its financing began, which my producers tell me was something quite easy and fast.
-Why shoot on celluloid?
-For all the technological advances applied for more than a century to the format so that, as Claire Denis says, celluloid can faithfully portray a person who blushes.
– They say that you make a cinema «for four geeks», how do you take it?
-I am familiar with reading that in a YouTube comment on ‘Attack of the Nebula-5 robots’ back in 2010, right?
-Right, you’ll be used to it. Where does your interest in ufology come from?
-From science fiction and the search for the fantastic in our reality. I am very interested in the person who sees the lights in the sky.
-Do you see yourself as a retired socialite in ‘Cuarto Milenio’?
– Years ago I saw the program and an artistic work by Joan Fontcuberta about a disappeared fictional astronaut was presented, without citing the author and implying that it was a real case. If I get to be a chat room, it gets mixed up. Answering your question, yes.
A frame from the film.
-That was sounded. You do not make it clear if you believe in other worlds or it is a simple excuse for irony, is it an indissoluble part of your sense of humor?
There is a certain ambiguity in my films between the fantastic and the domestic, which allows me to shoot in a neighborhood of Elche while talking about ancestral cosmic entities and with which I try to achieve a kind of multidimensional film that merges the space travel sequence of ‘2001, An odyssey in space ‘and a report from’ España directo ‘.
-Can you imagine filming a project according to Hollywood canons?
-What I don’t see is the Hollywood canon asking me to shoot a project.
-Surely they have already asked you if you are preparing a series, is it fashion … are you interested in the format?
-I like ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ so much that when I finished watching it I decided not to watch any other series ever again as a sign of respect.
-That’s called not wasting time. What do you miss about your beginnings making shorts?
-Nothing nothing. I love that everyone gets paid, not taking care of production stuff, not being my own assistant director …
-Wise words, has the audiovisual landscape really changed with the pandemic?
-It’s early yet. It takes more time to know the effects.
-You usually work with non-professional actors, are you worse than Hitchcock who did not respect them?
– Worse director, but better person.
A frame from the film.
-Do you rehearse with the cast? In the shoot itself, momentazos will emerge …
-We rehearse to make those moments possible, trying to ‘forget’ the text and naturalize it. I try not to memorize the text, to rely only on the underlying idea. If I tell you something that happened to me yesterday, and then you tell someone else about it, you are going to respect the background but you are going to change the words, the cadence, the order of the information … The same with the fictional ideas of ‘ Holy Spirit. ‘
-How was the casting? If there was …
-Long, with more than 3,000 people who signed up for a job offer “to play characters in a movie. It is not necessary experience in interpretation or have any particular physicist. We avoided using the word ‘casting’, because we wanted to find people who would never have thought to sign up for one.
-Which cinema attracts you especially? Science fiction, sure …
-The cinema that has mystery, humor, crazy ideas, that does not have solemnity or takes itself too seriously.
-Do you play other disciplines?
-It is the other arts that have taught me to write, as Robert Bresson said, quoting Stendhal in that famous documentary, when someone asked him if he had any advice for young filmmakers. I’m interested in music, design, literature, architecture, videogames… Some time ago I had a music group called Hikikomori and I won some euros in literary prizes.
-If one day any of your works does not win prizes or does not visit a festival, are you prepared?
-Perhaps that is the work that the members of the Spanish Film Academy are waiting to tuck me in their lap.
-You show the extraordinary of the everyday, is it inevitable to be a compulsive observer?
-It is true that all the time I am being a filmmaker, that I see spaces as possible locations, that I keep everything I hear, with a gesture that that man makes in front of me, with what that poster says … I live with a terror I constantly forget to point out something miniscule that I will never use in a movie, but which makes me very anxious to forget.
-Music is not omnipresent, but some songs in ‘Espíritu sagrado’ have special prominence, almost as if they were video clips …
-I really like it when the viewer shares listening to the music with the characters. I try to listen to fresh, unexpected music …
-The film talks about faith, it reveals a Spain that is not always recognized and many other things …
-Also talk about how if you sprinkle some graveyard dirt on your bed, then you sleep better. It’s like dumping a carrycot on you with the things that obsess me.
-Do you leave much of yourself in each of your jobs?
-My biography is boring, fortunately. I leave behind some aesthetic obsessions, a sense of humor very much based on the semi-private joke and a lot of love for the people I shoot with.
-The cult filmmaker, does he live or survive?
-It depends on whether you have rich parents or not. I am lucky to come from a working class family that has given me all their moral support, but I have to earn the euros.
-How do you see the audiovisual education of the average viewer?
– I suppose that the easy thing is to say that audiovisual education is lacking and it is possible that your question already foresees that grumpy answer. I don’t think there is an average viewer. Movies find eyes that want to see them through a combination of work and chance.
-Has something released in cinema agitated you lately?
-‘Memory ‘, by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. That shot, almost at the end, shot like that …
-Let’s not do spoilers. What would you recommend to someone who starts telling stories with a camera?
-That you immediately forget that false equivalence between making movies and telling stories. Let him experiment with what goes beyond the narrative, try to tell the absence of events, try to convey non-narrative sensations, do not be afraid of the mystery and do not let himself be bound by the presentation, middle and outcome scheme.
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