Second day of the festival and two films in competition. In Heaven without people by Lucien Bourjeily we meet a Lebanese family who, after two years, meets to eat. As corresponds to the current times, most of the children are scattered around the world. Between courses they comment on the country's political situation and address sensitive issues., such as personal relationships or religion. A little drama will turn this apparent harmony upside down.. The mother has lost an envelope with 12.000 dollars that the father had entrusted to him to deposit in the bank. Suspicions soon arise against each other.. Who stole the money?
The path that would finally illuminate this production was long and not without difficulties.. One year to write the script, six months to find the actors and two months of rehearsal for only nine days of filming, as Bourjeily himself explained in a press conference. But the biggest problem he had was with the censorship of his country, which did not welcome the treatment of certain sensitive issues of the political and social reality of Lebanon. “My history with censorship is very long.. I already have two plays that were censored. And this movie was almost censored. They wanted me to cut a part of the film myself as a way to submit because they knew I wouldn't accept any small cuts.. But I couldn't allow them to completely censor it because it would have been a big disappointment for me., for the actors and the entire team that had worked on it. In the end, "They cut the part when they are searching the maid's room for a political and religious issue.". The most complicated, however, was that the censorship imposed on the director himself the impossibility of talking about these cuts in his public presentations., something that was especially difficult for him due to the inability to justify something that the public perceived on the screen. “It was an imposition of silence”.
The first thing that catches your attention about this production is found in a formal invoice that opts for the camera in hand., a single space, the house, and interpretations that are the result of a more ironclad direction than it might seem at first.. “I really like improvisation.. In fact, I tried to have an improvisation part. But improvisation is very easy between three people or two people, but it is impossible with thirteen people. when someone says something, the other interrupts him and it is impossible. But I tried to do it. Sometimes, when an actor made a mistake, (For example, said the same line twice), I told them no, let's leave it, Alright, because that increased the realism of the film. I have done immersive theater before., which is a type of theater in which the audience not only watches the play, but participates. in this movie, “The camera plays the role of someone who immerses himself in the world of this family.”.
Con Heaven without people, Bourjeily sought to start from those family relationships to, in a broader sense, address the political and social situation in your country. “My decision to do this in the first place was because there are many things that I don't understand about Lebanon and that I think I still don't understand.”. One of the things I discovered were the different aspects of reality. What is reality from the fact that each of us perceives things in a different way. And one of the things is that we think about these events from within the family and that is a very subjective way of doing it.”. That barrier of incomprehension about reality rises, So, as the greatest obstacle to an always pending dialogue. “In Lebanon we do not have a single history book, so we don't have a single reality. In fact, those who govern today are responsible for tens of thousands of deaths among 1975 y 1990 and we do not have the same book that refers to those events. Everyone has their own reality. In this sense, It is very difficult to have a dialogue because if you do not have the same facts, If you don't start with the same basic things to agree on, it is very difficult to communicate and in the end it is very possible that you will explode.", the director commented.
How to make people reflect on all these questions was one of the objectives of a story that, as Bourjeily recognized, is based on personal experiences. “Some aspects of the story are based on something that happened to a friend of mine. He lost 12.000 dollars and at a family gathering he had to make this kind of opening to each other to try to find out who had taken the money. Some of the dialogues in the film are dialogues that I have heard. “This is how things are within the world of family intimacy.”. Confronting that intimacy with the viewer has not always been well received in a society that is not used to airing its dirty laundry.. “There was a day when someone approached me after a screening in Lebanon. It was an older woman who was offended. I asked her why and she told me this wasn't us.. That doesn't happen. I asked him if something similar had never happened to him in his entire life.. And she took me aside and told me: Yeah, maybe it will happen, But that's not something to put on a big screen.. This is our own privacy. “That was exactly the goal.”
A reality that confronts the viewer with certain aspects that reveal stains that are very difficult to wash., as is the case of the racism that prevails in broad layers of Lebanese society. “I can't assume that everyone is like that., but it exists. And I say this first hand. Some time later I was walking down the street and there was an Ethiopian foreign worker carrying a lot of things.. She almost fell in the street and I smiled unconsciously, instinctively. She looked at me offended. I told her I was sorry and that I wasn't laughing at her.. And I went and took her things and accompanied her to where she was going.. When we arrive, she asked me: are you lebanese? She was surprised that a Lebanese man helped her. She continued with her life., but it marked me when I thought that there was a lot of racism, especially against foreign workers. “There is a law against foreign workers that reduces them to a situation of quasi-slavery.”, the director commented.
In a totally different aesthetic order, the latest production by Alicante director Adán Aliaga was presented on screen.. A piece that distances itself from the previous proposal to play in an ambiguous terrain between realism and fantasy., the symbolic. Here, Jan is a young chef who works in a restaurant in New York.. The unexpected death of his father, forces her to return to her native Tabarca, a journey that will make you reconnect with your roots to rethink your entire life. “The film comes from our infatuation with the island of Tabarca, we live next door, and I spent the summer there as a child. I thought it was a magical and special place and I had to tell the story of what I felt when I was living there.. And on the other hand, the symbolic part is a kind of mixed bag that mixes real things about the island that the islanders have told us that still remain with powerful visual iconography that I like.. We've totally invented an algae monster and made a sort of mash-up of pagan mythology figures., religious, etc. Apart, we have filmed in New York, and the city is like an icon in itself. We really liked the metaphor between the island of Manhattan and the island of Tabarca. Millions live in one, in the other, “fourteen people”, the director commented at a press conference.
Filming in such a small space and with so little infrastructure available was, definitely, one of the biggest difficulties the team faced. “Filming on an island like this is very complex because, for not having, there are no cars. You simply move from one place to another. Everything is brought there by boat. We had to have long-term planning for the entire month of filming.. But, on the other hand, the reward is that decoration. We filmed in October because the water temperature is warmer and the light is very beautiful. “We were extremely lucky because we had very good weather.”.
Jan's story, of that sentimental immigration, refers to the director's own experiences. “It's my personal journey.. I couldn't find work here, I couldn't get the productions going and I went to New York with a plan to make another film and I also felt a little uprooted.. So, I also talk about that feeling. But life shows you a little path and no matter how hard you try, in the end you have to accept it. And that's the most beautiful thing, accept who you are and know yourself. “That is the emotional journey we have tried to portray in the film.”. G.LEON
