In mythology, Titan allowed his younger brother, Saturn, to rule, on one condition: he could not raise children. So, to keep his promise, Saturn devoured each of the children he had with Ops. Director Daniel Tornero, a lover of mythology, thought without hesitation of Saturn when he discovered, in 2018, that his grandfather had committed several crimes of pedophilia. That year they arrested him. His father called him and told him what had happened. This news was “a shock”, and he begins to reflect and analyze how this patriarchal figure, at the top of the family pyramid, could have left its mark on all subsequent generations.
Would his father be like his grandfather? Is he like his father? Can we escape such a legacy? Lots of questions to answer and a tool for that, cinema. With all this incendiary material, the director made Saturna documentary that takes the name of the myth to make a film that does not focus on the morbid or the hackneyed true crimebut prefers to x-ray family structures, fatherhood and inherited masculinity. He does it elegantly, giving space and constructing an almost blurred visual universe where he places his real family.
Since hearing the news, a “really complicated process of acceptance and integration” has begun. “There is a shock initial and there is a journey we must take that brings us to today. For a year and a half, we had to deal with diverse and complex emotions like fear, shame, pain… in a way, we have to reorganize our perception of the family structure,” explains the filmmaker.
During this trip he decided to make the documentary and after a year of thinking everything over, he spoke with everyone in his family. There he places the camera, but he always first asks himself what he wanted to capture and how. “The idea was to represent the family from a sensitive place, escaping morbidity at all times and not being sensationalist, but quite the contrary, seeking this complexity and these limits. On an aesthetic level, we also wanted to approach it from there, by generating long shots, without intervening in the editing, allowing the characters to travel in the film. Ethics and aesthetics are inseparable, the link is permanent. There was a lot of thought before, during and after,” he admits.
For this multifaceted portrait, he also decides to speak with his grandfather, confined in a country house while waiting to enter prison (where he is currently). Daniel Tornero was always clear that “it was important to be able to count on his presence”. “I didn’t want to establish his image almost as an entelechy formed from conversations with the rest of my family, but rather be able to generate that emotional complexity also from my encounter with him. There was also a personal desire on my part. I hadn’t seen my grandfather for three years and I felt it was necessary to see this person again and to somehow reorganize the image I had of my grandfather. father until that moment,” explains the director.
This meeting is one of the most difficult moments of the documentary. We listen to a man who does not accept what he did and who even goes so far as to blame the victims. A moment that the director describes as “painful”. “There were some painful moments in the film. Of course, we tried to find the way to the light, but it would not correspond to reality to deny that there were difficult times. There were some. And this is one of them,” he says sincerely, adding that he believes this film allowed us to “put ourselves in front of the mirror and be able to revisit ourselves”.
I hadn’t seen my grandfather for three years and I felt it was necessary to see this person again and to somehow reorganize the image I had of my grandfather. father until that time.
Daniel Tornero
— Director
This revisitation involves seeing how the family ends up being this “frame of reference, where one grows up and receives one’s first education”, and how in this family there was “a series of shadows and echoes that were projected in the present.” “It seemed like an interesting place to make a film that could reflect on parent-child relationships, on the way we interact with each other,” he emphasizes.
Saturn He also ends up talking about “masculinity” and its evolution. “There is an old woman, represented by my grandfather. And then there’s my father, who kind of trained with him and is in a kind of limbo. An emotional void in which he experiences emotions between love and hatred for his father. But also in a blur between generations, between totally opposite ways of understanding emotional management and human relationships. This is why my father also becomes, in a certain way, the fundamental pillar of the film. And then there is the next line, which already concerns masculinity in a different way. This is a subject that I think is important to revisit, because I believe that here too we have a path to follow. There’s a lot of generational change and that’s good, but I think we haven’t reached our destination, if there is one,” he says.
He does not consider this film to be “therapeutic”, he prefers the word “transformative”, because “this relationship is established between the film and life”: “The film is marked by the journey of the characters, who are the people of my family. , but at the same time the film itself has a transformative power on the people within it. “This horizontal relationship has a very transformative power. »
