The 33rd edition of the new Valencia Film Festival begins with the screening, during the opening gala that will take place tonight at the Palau de la Música, of the actor's first film production, screenwriter and (now) Valencian director Carles Alberola. Head of Albena Theatre, one of the most successful theater companies in our community, Alberola makes the leap to the big screen with the adaptation of his work Mesperaràs? As in the play itself, The film tells the misadventures of Rubén, a fifty-something literature university professor who hasn't quite found his better half. A dinner at your house with a couple of friends who will act as matchmakers, will come to try to fix this apparent dysfunction. But things won't be so easy, of course. Individual aspirations, The contradictions of life will be the main obstacles to finding the happiness desired by all the characters.. Mesperaràs? has had the participation of the original cast of the work, among whom are Alfred Picó and Rebeca Valls, who accompanied Alberola at the public presentation of his first feature film.
For Alberola, the premiere of this film was a dream that dates back to the beginning of his career., when I only imagined being able to make short films and maybe, some day, the film that is now being presented. But, as the saying goes, It is never too late if the happiness is good. “It has arrived when it has arrived and we have decided that Mesperaràs?“It could be the right story for the moment and for the place that we could tell within the production framework we had.” The adventure of Mesperaràs? It is the story of a process of confluences and difficulties that Alberola summarized before the media. why now?, he was wondering. “Since Albena was created, The approach was that of a theatrical and audiovisual production company.. Taking the step into audiovisual has already taken us ten years. And the cinema about twenty-three. This speaks of the enormous difficulty in setting up audiovisual projects.. I think now is a good time to do it.. But not only to do, but so that the film can be seen”. With a budget of just over €400,000, production conditions, more than an inconvenience, were an incentive to choose this project as the first production for the big screen that bears the name of his company.. “Many times you have to think about what you like, what you want to do and what you can do. In our case we are quite aware of our capacity and also of our limitations.. And I'm talking about having a budget that's tight enough for what you want to tell.. I think that many films die due to the fact of not being able to tell what you want with the money you have.. This was a movie that already, starting, I had a limited budget, but the script allowed us to walk at the same time. Obviously there is also the fact that it was a comedy, that it was a story that we thought could have a wide range of audiences, as he has had in theater. And we thought that it could be the ideal project to start and hopefully, in the future, start various stories”, Alberola account.
Leaving aside the argument, Mesperaràs? It is a film that wants to reflect on the conditions in which we operate in this complicated modern world where individualism seems to occupy everything.. An individualism that, however, abandons us to the idea that we have no control over our lives. “Apart from the incidents of history, What interested me was to talk about the fact of hope, of what differentiates us from the rest of the animals, of the ability we have to change our own lives, our own existence. We don't always get it, but many times we can fight to try to make things change. The movie talks about that, “For me it was the driving force.”. Taking advantage of the profession of its protagonist, Alberola proposes us, besides, a reflection on the value of fiction in our lives. “Fiction is basic to be able to live. In the daily fact of each of us there is fiction, there is the recreation of what happens. And it's something we do every day., therefore, I think we live with what happens to us, what we dream of, with what we think, with what we imagine. And that is what sometimes makes us very powerful because I believe that to achieve things the first thing you have to do in this life is dream them., It is to desire them.” How much of Rubén is left in Carles and how much of Carles is in Rubén?, the director reflected. “I wrote this work for a producer from Madrid, What happens is that in the end the project was not set up because many times, when you look for very well-known people, They are very difficult to fit. But even though I didn't write it for you, logically you have a series of springs or references, and there is a projection. I would say that I don't know in which of the four characters there is more of me. I feel identified with all of them and there are things about all of them that one has.. I believe that there is much less than what people believe and more than I think”.
In that step from the scene to the screen, however, Alberola needed to review some of the formal and plot approaches of a play that he, seen the result, the film doesn't seem like it can be peeled off. “At the script level I turned the socks around. I transformed the story that took place in a unit of time and space and there came a time when I thought that I only had to oxygenate the beginning because all the other exits from that space did was weaken the conflict of some characters locked in a specific time and a specific space in order to bring out what they hide., what they feel, what they think. And in that sense it was linked to its theatrical precedent.". The other challenge was in a distribution that, after almost two years performing the work on stage, had to adapt to the conditions of the new language. Reducing highlights and working on the privacy of the characters represented the greatest difficulty for the actors. “We hadn't been able to do audiovisual work for a long time, either in film or in anything.. The time when we performed in Autoindefinitsor in Maniatics[series broadcast by the defunct Canal 9] It was like getting used to the camera and a whole way of doing things.. In this case all of that had to be recovered quickly., quickly, because you want it not, even if the colleagues are known, it does not fail to provoke a certain respect in you, you have to collect a series of things, “Look for that privacy and we had to readjust because we had been doing nothing for a long time.”, commented Alfred Picó. Having shared hundreds of performances, however, It added as an important advantage when facing the project. “It's lucky because we were a family”, said Rebeca Valls, another of the casting companions. “From the play, the communication between us was already done. With that we were starting from a privileged point. But it is that, besides, We were lucky enough to meet again with an entire team from the audiovisual medium with whom we had not worked for many years because there was nothing. There was no TV in Valencia, audiovisual projects were not carried out in Valencia. This luck of having the people with whom we had worked in Autoindefinitsor in From the beginningor in socrates, those colleagues who were no longer dedicated to this, meet again together doing a common project, also the first film by Carles Alberola, “It was fortunate and a privilege for everyone.”.
After passing through the Mostra, you will wait for me? will enjoy a premiere in the theaters of the Lys Cinemas in Valencia, for, simultaneously, go to the Lleida Film Festival and the Chicago Film Festival, luego Brazil and start, So, his commercial journey, first in Catalan and Balearic lands and then to the rest of the country. To Alberola, expectations with the public are high. “We hope that we can drag, not to the whole, that we would like, of the spectators we had at the theater, which are many, but only if half came we would feel satisfied. It is breaking inertia. People are not in the habit of watching movies in Valencian, among other things because cinema is not shown in Valencian and there is always a strangeness in the audiovisual. It is a fact of custom. So it's an unknown what we have in front of us. We are trying to take care of our capacity as much as possible., first so that people know what we are doing. From what we have perceived, “We have a good feeling.”
and from here, who knows. For Alberola this is the first of many other projects to come. “For me the ideal would be to be able to simultaneously tell stories, both in theater and on television, like in the cinema because the pleasure you get in one is different from the pleasure you get in another. Or you can explore territories that you cannot in other media. Obviously we really want to continue and in fact we have several film projects that are there.” we will see.
