Love sometimes suffocates. Family relationships often involve added pain, worry, resentment… The anger and frustration of one family member can push others to the limit of fatigue and resistance. The filmmaker Sandra Romero collects this suffocating love in its extraordinary first film, Where the silence passeswhere it also portrays the hopelessness of a generation, the reality of the disease and the situation of the working class in the towns.
Starring by Antonio Araqueprofessional actor, and his two brothers, Javier and Marianatural actors, the film is a fiction that respects reality, that moves in undefined territories, in which the visual commitment of its director is especially eloquent. Born under the program CIMA Impulsaof the Association of Women Filmmakers and of Audiovisual Mediaand reinforced in Film Academy Residences, Where the silence passes premiered in San Sebastian Festival and he just won in the LesGaiCineMad festival.
The film tells of Antonio’s return to Écija in Easter week. It is the reunion with his family, above all, with his twin brother Javier, who has a disability and needs your help. The situation will make him face the decision of whether to stay and help his parents and sister or return to the life he has built outside.
Where Silence Passes is a fiction built on the real lives of its characters. How did you get to this border territory?
I am neither interested in pure fiction nor pure documentary, so I have no choice but to find the way in which I want to make films. And it is still a cinema that is fiction, but that does not escape from life, that does not limit itself to imitating it in a way that does not convince me, but that tries to make life go through this fiction. It’s what I connect with and what excites me.
Did you want to portray the dependency relationships that exist in families or was it the observation of this family that led you to the story?
Well, I come from a family in which my mother has been dependent all her life, until the end, and, of course, I have lived that way all the time, with a feeling very similar to what Antonio experiences in the film . In this case the particularity is a brother and a brother has a different relationship than that between a daughter and a mother, however, in some way, my mother was a little my sister too.
I have known Antonio since I was fifteen years old, that is, half my life and one more year. To Javier too, of course. But until I started making films I didn’t discover everything we had in common. And then I already had an impulse to make one family movie and talk about dependency. I am very interested in how Antonio’s character and Javier’s character are related because there is a particularity there, which is a dependency. I think I wanted to portray or tell or talk about a dependent person, but without simplifying it. Every human being is complex and a human being who is also different entails more complexity.
From the intimacy of that family you get a political film that portrays the reality of the towns of Spain, the hopelessness of working class youth…
Yes, above all I wanted to portray what my environment is and it is still my point of view, but we exist and it is there. It is an environment and it is a youth that I often see sad, that does not find a way to be well, but that also knows how to have a good time, like no one else. I have tried to make a portrait as honest as possible, without judging.
And it is true that we come from a working class and there is the character of María, who is a luminous character, but who goes through a series of circumstances within the town that are not at all simple and that have to do with education, care and the woman, belonging to a working class that has to get up at five in the morning, drink a shot of anise and pack oranges… and that for 500 or 600 euros a month. That has to be there because it is part of my environment.
Speaking of the role of women as caregivers, the film shows the different roles in the family. Did you want to highlight that gender inequality?
Completely, and I think it’s something that we don’t start to ask ourselves until we’re adults. However, when we are adults, we ask ourselves questions and try to choose. I think there is a intrinsic guiltwhich is also in the film, a guilt that one can only live with, but one can also live with those contradictions. What I think I also tell in the film is that the solutions are not so easy, that is why the decision that each character makes seems valuable to me, whatever it may be. It always seems to me that there is some value in staying and there is some value in leaving.
There are many close-ups in the film, but there are also some split images that seem to reflect the two worlds that these two brothers live in, their two different realities.
At the staging level, what initially interested me was to be very close to them. That causes the bodies to fragment, there are gestures that take on other dimensions, being almost another brother with the c, in the end, literally, it was one more body between them. A camera operator, Ángelo was the one who was always among them, he was already part of that trio of brothers. And at the same time, in that being close, he captured those gestures that are very valuable because they are real brothers and they are gestures that they bring from life.
In that closeness there is also oppression. It is a film that tells a lot in close-ups and detailed shots and there is a certain oppression that I was also interested in leaving in the image. We also see a town, but we see it through kitchens, faces, hands. Those human landscapes are the ones that interested me, they are the ones that tell the town for me and not so much a map of a street…
You are a filmmaker who comes from a working class background, how does that define your work?
I think there is one thing that we have working class which is that we greatly appreciate the profession. The profession of film direction is very important to me, that is, I cannot sit at home for three years to make the next film, I am already working, teaching and I have made a series that is beautiful (The new yearsby Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Sara Cano and Paula Fabra) and that one really fell from the sky, because it was a commissioned work, but at the same time it is a commission with which I connected a lot.
But of course, we working class people have to work. I feel that I am very lucky because it is not easy at all. When I started studying film, I was very scared to see that new directors when they came out were 40 years old, I was in my early twenties and I thought, how am I going to survive? Then I discovered that I can teach, that I can work on other films and I calmed down a little.
But, of course, I thought How am I going to start working at 40 years old? I hope that in the case of other colleagues they are not a one-time thing in the cinema, but I think that there will be more and more people who are not usually making films, but are doing it. Obviously, there is another part of society, we have to be realistic, that right now cannot access a school. They still gave me a loan, they have given me scholarships, I have worked, but there are people who do not have that access.
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