Day 3. And Sympathy for the devil y Fatwa They took us to the problem of the war in Sarajevo and radical Islamism in Tunisia, The third film of the official section screened before the public and press of La Mostra led us, yesterday, to another conflict: the syrian war. Or it would be more correct to say, the beginnings of the civil war that is now ravaging the country, causing a harsh diaspora of millions of exiles abroad. The day I lost my shadow takes us to the beginning of the year 2011. Frequent power outages make life very complicated for city residents and make it difficult to provide themselves with the most basic resources., forces the population to develop their ingenuity to survive. In this context, A woman goes on a journey to get the gas she needs to prepare food for her son.. Two brothers traveling with her are involved in the fight against the government.. On this trip, the woman will discover that, both the man and other characters that he will meet on his way, they lack their shadow. They are the consequences of war.
Soudade Kaadan, director of this unique project builds with these elements a story that tries to move away from the figures, political causes and weak news analysis to focus on particular individuals. “I wanted to reflect my opinions on the conflict, but I didn't want to analyze the sociopolitical context, “What I wanted was to reflect what this moment of change towards dictatorship means for the lives of citizens.”, commented after the screening. “When I started writing the script, I was wondering how to express what one feels when involved in a war.. I had many images of Syria, but I was looking for a way to express it that was not direct. Then I started looking at different images and movies, and that research led me to the images of Hiroshima after the bomb explosion, after the area had been devastated and only shadows of the people remained. I liked this metaphor, that I tried to incorporate to demonstrate the reality of living a life without shadow”.
The idea for this project started with the sudden interest in the Syrian conflict on the part of the Western media.. After an initial silence, International networks and activists focus their attention on the problem. Para Kaadan, exiled in Lebanon, This sudden explosion of information came as a surprise to see his country portrayed in five-minute summaries that, however, They seemed to distance themselves from those truly affected by the situation. “What caught my attention was how these images dealt with the issue without showing human faces.”. So I thought I wanted to boil it all down to a very simple story about people, so that anyone who saw the film would feel a connection to being a working class person trying to get gas, that tries to overcome the day to day. What I was looking for was for the public to feel this pain., that sense of loss and were linked to the tragedy.”
In this attempt to recreate that everyday life, Kaadan's film moves between realism and a dream state to which it subjects its characters. After all, as its protagonist says, war is like a bad dream that has no end. That state of confusion, similar to what we feel when we dream, marks the structure of a film that does not always try to clear up all doubts about what is happening. Time and space become, So, elements almost ungraspable for a viewer who, sometimes, He doesn't really know where he is or where he's going or his ultimate motivation., it needs, of what is happening. “During the writing of the script the story was somewhat more linear from a narrative point of view, But when editing I wanted to remove certain elements so that there would not be such a clear succession of the story.", commented the director. “It was about showing some moments, so that we did not know if what was happening was reality, dreams or fears that the main character suffers”.
The gestation of The day I lost my shadow corresponds to a long work process that begins with the script, in the case of Soudade Kaadan, perhaps the part of the development of a film that he finds most complicated. “Writing a script is the most difficult thing.. I prefer to direct. In my case, I base it on an image, and this is what brings me to the script. I don't start writing until I have developed the idea and this process can take me a year.. In this case, I had the image of the shadow, also from the search for the gas cylinder, etc. This way of working is something shared by a short film that I presented at Sundance that told what it means to be a Syrian in exile.. In this short the image was a red car and, again, we have a tree, a shadow… Now I am working on a story in which a house becomes a tent that has no walls.”
But writing the script was only the first step in the long career to bring a radically independent production to fruition., both in its conception, your intentions, as in the result that appears on the screen. “It has been a very difficult experience making a film in Syria, especially if you live in exile, as is my case. It took me seven years to complete the project. It is very difficult because when you lose the country you lose the public., lose the public financing system and start from scratch. Besides, I didn't want to do it like the typical European commercial production, "But I wanted to do it in a more personal way in which I expressed what I wanted to say about the war.". In collaboration with his sister, who would take over the production tasks, Kaadan found herself embarked on a very complicated process in which she recognizes that she made many mistakes, but without which she would not have obtained the result she desired and which she finds perfectly intertwined with the message or reflection to which her film invites us.. “The process of making this film also reflects what it means to be Syrian. It is very difficult to film in Syria, especially since most of the actors are in exile. In the case of the main actress, she did not receive the visa until the day before she started filming.. We even did the editing at my house because we didn't have enough money to rent a studio.. It was very nice, “But I know that I would never like to work like that again.”.
From Syria to contemporary Greece, of cinema with political overtones, to the black genre. It is what it offers us The miracle of the Sargasso sea, film directed by Syllas Tzoumerkas, and presented in the Official Section by its main actress, Angeliki Papoulia, face known to the public after having collaborated in films such as Alps by Yorgos Lanthimos, among other jobs. Papoulia es Elisabeth, a police that, after being threatened by a terrorist group, He has to leave Athens to embrace a destiny in a small coastal town as head of the local police. ten years later, Elisabeth lives with her son, now teenager, emotionally sunk among colleagues whom she despises and in front of whom she must show her authority, and a local power oligarchy that will soon show its decadent lifestyle. While, Rita, a woman working in an eel factory, tries to escape from that claustrophobic world in which they both coexist.
Of that precisely, of interpretation, This is what Angeliki Papoulia came to talk to us after the screening of what was her second collaboration with Tzoumerkas. Acting and character construction, obligatory theme when we face on screen the vicissitudes of a character as peculiar as Elisabeth. The Greek director's proposal tries to explore the codes of the noir genre, both in the construction of a story in which the action and the achievement of dramatic events is at times in the background, to focus especially on individual conflicts. a tape, in the words of Papoulia, very physical. “We started trying to work on the physicality of the character. For example, the way he walked. That was the first element we worked on.. And when we had that way of walking, the way the body behaved, then we started to work on its complexity, because the character is full of contradictions, “It has many layers.”, commented the actress after the screening of the film at the Babel cinemas, contest venue. “Elisabeth's character has many qualities, and the biggest difficulty was how to balance all those qualities, his aggressive character, his vulnerable character, the rude way he has of speaking to others and, at the same time, her way of being rude to herself”.
Es, precisely, that work of progressive character coding where we find the most solid bet of Syllas Tzoumerkas' proposal, an element that ends up permeating the entire tape. “I don't like it when directors limit the character. That doesn't inspire me. With the directors I try to find the essence of the character, what motivates them, see who they are fighting, against those who oppose, see why they do what they are doing. That is to say, I focus on things that have more to do with energy, with the action. A parallel could be made with music. Have, on the one hand, the score, But then you have to know how to interpret it.", comments the actress. For Angeliki Papoulia, the process of character construction has to do with energies that little by little flow within her.. “I'm not a method actress.. I wouldn't really know how to do it., but it is not the method. I try to find a space in which to immerse myself, a space that is time, the time or reality of the character, and that's what I'm trying to do, immerse myself in this reality. I try not to think too much and get into the energy of the character and even if I can't understand something with my brain or with my rational side, I try to interpret it through the energy of my body. I try to combine my brain, my emotional state, the energy of my body and my spirit, and I try to get those four elements combined to be aligned. That's my way of approaching the character.:”
Designed, in Papoulia's own words as a metaphysical thriller, The miracle of the Sargasso sea share with The day I lost my shadow a certain state of dreaminess close to the mystical ecstasy in which the Greek director immerses the characters. Thus, while the plot is resolved, a series of religious images assault the two protagonists of the story. “Those religious images are very important for the film. For me it has to do with the way these two women relate.. The two women share the same dream space and, somehow, They find themselves in it with these religious dreams. For the film it is a very important element because this space of dreams is a space for them to live.. They live in that space, They would like to live there and it helps them in the sense that it frees them from the reality of their daily lives.. It is a miraculous space that we could all access if we tried.”
In a world ruled by men, Elisabeth will have to survive. A world that appeals to contemporary Greek society. “Greece is still a very patriarchal country, so it was very familiar to me the fact of how a woman fights against that patriarchy and tries to live with dignity. It's not easy to live like this. The good thing for her is that she knows. She is, somehow, defeated, That's why she is sent to this small town where she lives for ten years and where she feels trapped.. In any case, "She will find her own way to escape.". G.LEON
