Because in 2020, with cinemas reopened after the pandemic, Pilar Palomero surprised everyone with The girls, The director did not stop. With his debut, he won the Goya for best film and best new director and the impetus to start a career that had taken too long to get going but was now unstoppable. With his second film, Kindergarten, He has already competed for the Golden Shell in San Sebastian, and his protagonist, Carla Quílez, won the Silver Shell.
With his third work, The sparks -which hits theaters on October 4th-, returns to the competition. He does so with his best film to date. The most mature and the most moving. A new step forward for the director, who is aiming for the Golden Shell with this adaptation of the story by Eider Rodríguez A heart too big. Palomero is exciting with the story of a woman who decides to take care of her ex-partner in his last days and ends up creating a film that is more brilliant than dark. More about life than about death itself, and where he once again gives an unforgettable scene, that of the palliative team that explains to everyone, the patient and his family, how to face what is coming.
A scene where the palliative team is real and where the work of interpretation reaches its peak, with a brilliant Patricia López Arnaiz, the discovery of Marina Guerola and, above all, a remarkable and surprising Antonio de la Torre, who beyond the physical change he achieves here one of his best performances in a prodigy of restraint and naturalness as the patient. A project born almost as a commission. It was the producer Fernando Bovaira who, after the premiere of Girls, In December 2020, he offered to adapt the novel. The story interested him a lot. I had never adapted a book, and I already had the project of Kindergarten directed, but placed on the starting line of a third film which posed a question to the director: what would she have done?
Then he realized that, in addition, this film gave him the opportunity to talk about something that was in all his short films but not so much in the feature films, namely “the theme of the passage of time, disappearance, memory and forgetting.” It was not only that. It also touched him in a deep and intimate way because of his experience when he lost his father. Perhaps that is why one of the changes in this adaptation is that Palomero took her to the town of Horta de Sant Joan, in Tarragona, the town of her grandparents and where she spent her summers.
Palomero focuses again on what cinema usually ignores. What cinema directed by men has not paid attention to. Who would be interested 15 years ago in the education of girls or teenage mothers who did not want to be? He now repeats the process by looking at death without epic, naturally, without the weight of Catholicism that also marked the stories of his previous films. He assures that these common lines are not deliberate, but that they perhaps respond to his own “research”.
A death can also help you position yourself differently in relation to your own life.
Pilar Palomero
— Director
“I feel like in movies, we try a lot to look for something. In The lightnings One of my goals was also to try, in the extremely painful context of losing a loved one, to find something that could have a certain beauty. It is very difficult to say when you have just experienced it, but I have had similar experiences. When my father died, I was in Sarajevo and I had to take a plane. I say it now in interviews, it is a decision that I made, to talk about it openly. I had to take a plane and during this trip there were many strangers who took care of me, “he recalls.
Here we see one of the central themes of the film, the need for self-care in an increasingly individualistic world. The importance of kindness in times of cynicism. Good people as agents of almost revolutionary change. “It’s not just about Isabel’s character taking care of her ex-partner, we all have to take care of everyone. Death is obviously painful, but while we’re here, we have to try to take care of ourselves. It seems like a good-natured or slightly naive message, but I want to defend it. For me, this film is about four characters who are really good and I wanted to talk about that. We have to try to be good people. It’s just that being good seems stupid. It’s not like that, and you’re not prudish when you claim goodness and demand care,” he says.
Something is happening because there are several films that want to change the history of death. Only in this Official Section of San Sebastian there is, in addition to The sparksCosta-Gavras’ latest film, The last breathon palliative care. A few weeks ago, it was Pedro Almodóvar who won the Golden Lion for his fascinating look at death and euthanasia in The next pieceand Seminci will be inaugurated by The dust will bewhich will also address the same subject of the musical.
For Palomero, it was a surprise, but he believes that it responds to the fact that there is a desire to “want something to change” within the established and official narratives: “I understand that they will be very different proposals, but what I wanted was to talk about how, through a death, you can also position yourself in a different way in relation to your own life. It is something that I have lived, that I have experienced and that the palliative doctors, when documenting me for the project, constantly repeated to me. They told me that people do not really understand what palliative care is. We always think that it is a team that accompanies a person to die well, and in reality what they do is accompany them to live well the time they are here. That is what I found interesting and what I wanted to see in the film. That there are deaths, but above all lives.
