After discussing how to face the beginning of life in “The Years to Come,” Carlos Marqués-Marce (Barcelona, 1983) wanted to talk about something “as difficult” as “the end of oneself.” It was the germ of “The dust will be”, the latest film project of the Catalan director which inaugurated this Friday the 69th edition of the Valladolid International Film Week. The Spaniard Ángela Molina and the Chilean Alfredo Castro are the protagonists of this type of musical tragicomedy designed in three acts, for which Marqués-Marcé worked hand in hand with the artist and composer María Arnal. The filmmaker defined his work during the press conference after the inaugural screening as “a film about the condition of death and the unconditionality of love.”
Claudia, an award-winning and renowned actress, already in the twilight of her life, decides that she does not want to live with the terminal cancer that has been detected in her, so with her partner, the director Flavio, who has not yet Separated from her Over the last forty years, they decided to implement a project to end their lives together in Switzerland with the help of a voluntary association for assisted dying. The decision, which he justifies because “I don’t want to live in pain when she leaves”, surprises his three children, who do not understand the path that their parents decided to follow, in particular his daughter Violeta, the oldest close to them. and who tries to find his place in this story of unconditional love.
The director said that precisely the trigger for the scenario was the discovery of a similar situation experienced by a couple of friends. From there he embarked on a long journey, attending workshops and listening, until writing the first draft of the script, “a collage of very diverse things”, which he sent to his production companies in March 2020, the same week as the pandemic. . “Then with Clara Roquet we started putting everything together and trying to find the fine thread that could unite them,” added the director, who recognized that it was “a very long distillation process “and that The film, which won an award at the Toronto Film Festival, suffered numerous “altercations” until you see the light.
“It was sort of a debugging job. When you face the end of life, you think about the traditions that exist. This led us to the baroque, to the way of speaking about something which is the end of itself. It’s something very difficult to say, so inexplicable, that other languages are needed, and that’s where dance comes in and everything comes into play,” he summed up, referring to to the work he developed with María Arnal and the choreographer Marcos Morau. It was precisely by watching the shows “Sonoma” and “Opening Night” in La Verona that the director and the musician clearly understood that. they needed the dance company in this project, “because of their way of approaching darkness and their ability to bring the ineffable, with a strange and absurd humor, which could set a unique tone.
Asked what makes a young director wonder about death, Marques-Marcet explained that “it’s good to start thinking about death as early as possible”, because “we all go there and no one is spared.” “In Catalan, love and death are very similar, they are the two themes, there is nothing more, they are very close. When you decide to leave, the first thing it affects is everything around you. It is politically important to think that we do not live alone, but with many people around us, and we wanted to investigate these boundaries between love and dependence. In this sense, he added that although we all “need others”, this dependence “can sometimes be very toxic” and the search for this limit was also something that interested him in this process.
It is “a film about love more than death, and about a love without barriers, which goes beyond the love of children, of life and of everything”, recognized actor Alfredo Castro, also present at the presentation, who described the project as an “choral” film because it addresses very diverse themes. Regarding his collaboration with Ángela Molina, he thanked his co-star for inviting him to “travel to very unknown acting places.” “She is a very generous actress, very spontaneous and sincere. I had to follow her from outside. Carlos, on the other hand, likes to rehearse and we don’t, so we ended up doing a very in-depth psychoanalysis.
The aforementioned, Ángela Molina, explained that for her, the film told “this family’s journey into mystery.” When asked how she would experience this approach to death, she replied that although this “journey” is “the same” for everyone, “there are as many deaths and ways of dying as there are people “. “Everyone must take responsibility for this relationship which must be established with the real idea that we must trace a path that comes closer to our own dignity, and if possible do it as we wish, with a smile of gratitude. “Life and love are greater than death.”
In this sense, the director concluded that at no time did he intend with this film to be “provocative”, but rather to try to take the spectator to “places where he can pose questions questions”.
