No matter what app or website you looked at, the weather forecast for that day in Vigo was clear: absolute sunshine. “It’s the only bad day that’s happened this summer,” said a local resident, seeing the worry and the looks at the overcast sky and the fog that was appearing in the port. If this bad day were a holiday day, nothing would happen, but on a shoot, time is of the essence, and planning a day with sunshine and its absence is an unforeseen event that can’t always be faced. Sometimes there are plan Bs, interiors that can be filmed, but this time it wasn’t like that.
As they approach the house on a secluded beach on the coast of Vigo, where they will film that morning, the fog becomes increasingly dense. On the dirt road that leads down to the location, Carla Simón appears. A member of the production team, a Galician and connoisseur of his time, approaches with a prediction: “Don’t worry, it will be over in a few hours.” The director does not seem nervous, quite the contrary. He enters his film set with that calm that transmits and is contagious. He will later admit that by filming in Galicia, he has learned to “accept” these meteorological setbacks.
Simón is in the middle of filming Pilgrimage his third film. The next one after this historic Golden Bear in Berlin with Alcarras. He assures that he doesn’t feel any pressure because at the moment he is in “survival mode” in the middle of filming. A filming that assures that it is very different. He will leave the camera in his hand, he will play with dreamlike flashes and there will be two timelines (the 80s and the 2000s). In this change of style, the challenge is that “the tone remains the same, that it is alive”. For this, he will have Hélène Louvart, the director of photography of filmmakers like Eliza Hitman, Lynne Ramsay and Alice Rohrwacher with whom he has wanted to work for years. With Pilgrimage promises that he closes the trilogy of family memory that he developed in Summer 1993 And Alcarras. He was missing one of the peaks to investigate his past and his history, that of his biological father’s family.
As the weather does not improve despite the forecast, Carla Simón takes the opportunity to attend to a very small number of media who have come to Vigo to see how things are going. There he gives clues about what will be seen next year, on a date to be determined and which will depend on the international festival that decides to host its premiere. He says that the pilgrimage of the title – in addition to the connotation of “mystical journey of the character” – a procession with boats in the sea, they had also planned to film it in the sun and the only rainy day of the whole month of July arrived and they ended up recording the virgin wrapped in plastic. To perfect the bad weather, a drone equipped with a camera fell into the sea on a windy day, losing all the aerial shots. Now, Hélène Louvart has declared that drones are prohibited.
The letters from the beginning
The idea of Pilgrimage It was born from some letters written by Carla Simón’s mother. They were letters that he had written from many places, many of them from Vigo, where he lived with his father (both died of AIDS, as he said in Summer 1993). He finds in it the testimony of a generation that cinema does not talk about “because of the taboo of drugs and AIDS.” “I felt it that way. I tried to find my family memory and they always told me about it in bits and pieces and with euphemisms. It is very difficult to understand what happened, to draw a little of what my parents may have experienced. When your parents are alive, you can ask them, and they will tell you what they want or not, but you get the idea. When there is an absence with death, there is a lot of stigma and taboos,” he explains about a film that, according to him, speaks “of memory.” Or better yet, about what to do when “this family memory does not exist and how to invent it.”
That is why the film is also “a kind of homage to that generation”. “It is still very difficult for us to talk about the number of people who died at that time because of this problem. Many of us lost our parents to AIDS and we had to live with that. Not only us, but also their families, because there was a lot of suffering due to deaths caused by overdoses, AIDS or road accidents, as was the case at that time. Families were broken. There are entire families that lost many people. Here in Galicia especially, because almost everything came back here. When we did the casting, it was very strong, because I always asked them what their relationship was to it and almost everyone knew someone who had died of AIDS”, he adds.
When your parents are alive, you can ask them their story. And they tell you what they want or don’t want. When there is an absence, with death involved, there is a lot of stigma and taboo.
Carla Simon
— Director
So it seems that Pilgrimage it will be like Alcarras, the portrait that tells the political from an intimate point of view. “The fact is that in all families and in all personal stories there is a political reflection,” says Carla Simón forcefully, who also has this will here. “We stopped talking about that generation. It’s very unfair. They didn’t want to die of an overdose or of AIDS. Many had already left it and then got AIDS, which was the case with my mother. And no one knew then what consequences heroin had. It was as if they had chosen to lead that life. Many were not able to leave, and I think that we talk about the B side in a somewhat dubious way, which seems very unfair to me,” he says.
So, his third film will be a film that somehow confronts what is called historical memory. “It always seems that when we talk about historical memory, we only talk about Francoism and the Civil War, and for me that’s also the case. Beyond quinqui cinema, there aren’t so many stories, and when they are talked about, it’s in a dark and shameful way. As a daughter of that generation, I don’t judge my parents. I want to understand what your story is. What I find interesting is that when there is a fictional character who has experienced something like that, he is always angry, but not me, and then I want to represent him out of curiosity about family memory, which is important to me,” he says.
An actress getting off the bus
The prediction comes true and after eating, a bright sun appears to film the scene as they had imagined it. A choral scene, where one of the novelties of this film appears, the mix of professional actors and others “à la Carla Simón”, that is, chosen in long casting processes that go from schools to walking the streets looking for people who suit them. what they are looking for.
This is the case of the protagonist, Llùcia Garcia, the alter ego of Simón in the fiction that she and her producer, María Zamora, met when they got off the bus. They had seen many girls, but they couldn’t find what they were looking for. One day, in the Gràcia neighborhood of Barcelona, getting off the bus, with a backpack, Llùcia appeared, returning from a scout meeting. The day she did the casting, she turned 18, as if that were a sign that it was her. “She had the physique and the spirit that we were looking for,” recalls Simón, who admits to having seen professional actresses this time. They also went to cities, to institutes… but he resisted until the end.
Alongside him Mitch Robles, Tristán Ulloa and Janet Novás, the protagonist of Oh Horn. All of them have had a lot of rehearsal time and are now in the scene that Carla Simón will shoot this afternoon. A meeting of young and old where they will sing and play live. You look, by Lole and Manuel, a song that Tarantino has already used in Kill Bill and that now resonates in Novas’ voice. “Knowing her, she’s going to repeat it about five times,” María Zamora anticipates. And he’s right.
Yes indeed. Always with his calm style. Even saying that what he sees doesn’t work, he does it calmly. “More vivid!!”, he corrects them after cutting the shot and getting back under a black sheet to see the combo without the light disturbing him. When you look closely, you see that you are not alone. At his side, also under that black coat, is his sister Berta, who was also part of Summer 1993 and of Alcarras. Because Pilgrimage It’s also a familiar story, even on set.
