MAIN THEATER. boats, 15
Day 1. In front of the movie screen were, opening the new edition of the Mostra, friends and collaborators, acquaintances and family of the Valencian director Toni Canet, whose last job, white lime, carbon black, The festival will open this afternoon in its inaugural session. To celebrate the event and accompany the recently deceased Canet in the retrospective that the event dedicates to all of his audiovisual work, were his daughter Montse, his widow Loreto Primo, its co-screenwriter Joan Olivares and the journalist Carlos Aimeur who presented, at once, Toni Canet, the son of the calero, a book published by the festival about the life and work of the director of Llutxent.
It is precisely Llutxent, his hometown, one of the two protagonists of this documentary film that tells us about professions that are disappearing or disappearing altogether, of worlds about to fall into oblivion, consequence of the line that marks technological advances and the new structures that indicate that concept in constant movement that we call modernity. The other main space is found in a small town in Teruel called Formiche Alto., another of those worlds affected by the threat of depopulation, part of that sad concept that we have come to call empty Spain, and that here it takes shape in specific faces and spaces. There Canet found the reason for his work, the profession of charcoal burner, whose process he wanted to document to leave testimony of it. Coal as a product of the resources offered by the land that surrounds men will be the black that is mentioned in the title of this work.. The white is provided by lime obtained from another tradition., this one already Mediterranean, the same limestone profession that Canet himself practiced in his childhood with the help of his father..
But, What was a man with such a Mediterranean essence as Canet doing in a small town in the deepest Teruel?? Canet's relationship with Formiche comes from his wife, whose family has deep roots in the town. The director and his partner spent their last summers there. “When Toni met Formiche he fell in love with that town, which will have sixty inhabitants, and that belongs to that emptied Spain that is now talked about so much. “He fell in love with the town and the people.”, says Loreto Primo, his widow. For Joan Olivares, his co-screenwriter, Canet “lived in a very intense way everything that was related to life in the countryside.”, craft and manual work, because as a child he had dedicated a lot of time to making lime kilns and selling lime in the towns, and when he discovered that in Formiche there was such an ancient trade, as traditional and for him as intimate as his, “He immediately threw himself into it.” The gestation process of the documentary underwent a gradual transformation as it progressed., from the initial idea, to filming and final assembly. “In principle the intention was to make a kind of ethnographic documentary”, says Olivares. “But things grew., especially when his friends from La Vall d'Albaida found out that he was going to build a coal mine and they told him: Toni, you can't make a charcoal pit without making a lime forn. I think that at that moment he saw that this relationship could be established between black and white., between two important stages of his life.”
It was the hope of both Canet and Olivares himself that the documentary would awaken the public's interest in the professions of coal and lime maker., whether as a reference to a common past, or as a potential engine for an industry, tourism, necessary in some areas, as is the case of Formiche, hungry for new economic incentives. “In Formiche it seems to me that not much will change. Unfortunately coal is dead as an element of the future. Evidently, as a means of producing energy it makes no sense. I don't know if one day something can be recovered at the tourist level., but I think that, at the moment, there is nothing”, Olivares continues explaining. “Lime is something else. (…) In Llutxent, lime pits are being recovered and some very interesting tourist routes are being recovered., There are ovens in different states of construction in which the process can be explained and it is possible that, in a few years, that is an important tourist attraction for the town. Besides, there is the question of the recovery of old buildings. There are a series of European laws and regulations that require buildings of a certain age to be restored with their original elements.. And in the past cement did not exist, the cement was lime and, therefore, “That opens the door to some jobs.”
For Montse Canet, daughter of the director, The screening of this film serves a dual purpose, as recognition of his father's work and as a confrontation against a present little aware of its immediate past. “For me it is a very important testimony as the daughter and granddaughter of caleros. I live outside of Spain, in Switzerland. It is a totally different world and we don't have that close to ancient trades and, somehow, I do feel that generations pass and that that is lost. Not only for the job, stories are lost, memory is lost, the human relationships that are seen here are lost”, Montse commented to the press. “I find this to be an invaluable testimony.”, not only for me, but for the future generations that come and who will be able to see how it was lived. But how did you really live?, not like in American movies where people light a bonfire under the stars, but how the chickadees lived, the lime trees, how they thought, “How they related.”.
But white lime, carbon black It is more than just an ethnographic work.. Es, in the mouths of those present at this first session of the Mostra, reflection of the character of a filmmaker who knew how to attract people to his projects. “Toni was an extraordinary character. Probably one of the few people I've ever met who can do that.. How did he do it? Don't know. The most surprising thing is that he did it with a simplicity and naturalness in which he did not ask anyone for anything.. Simply, He would drop it on you and you would get stuck in the car because you felt like it.. It was one of the greatest virtues that Toni had., the ability to convoy people and make them come together”, comments Olivares, documentary screenwriter. That essence also beats in the book written by journalist Carlos Amaiur, a text that, in your own words, it's a kind of making off of his personality and his work. It is the portrait “of a man of the people, of a man for the people, of a tireless worker and a creator capable of creating against all odds. Because he didn't have it easy at all. In fact, suffered blockages from certain people and, yet, managed to make a career in which there are masterpieces like The wings of life or like this movie”. For Amaiur, Canet “was one of the most talented people in the Valencian audiovisual industry and it made me very angry to see that not even he had all the necessary means to do everything he could have done.”. I believe that the tragedy is in Valencian society because, because of these short-sightedness, “We have missed these great works that Toni could have bequeathed to us.”
That impossibility to develop their projects in their confrontation, in the words of Amaiur, with the administration and the stunted Valencian industry, would mark his entire career, especially during his last years. “I am an immigrant, like so many young people who have left this country”, said his daughter Montse. “I sometimes told him Toni, but get out of there. If it's one trip after another, it's crazy. How can you be there working?? What are you doing there? And he told me, I am here, this is my land, these are my people, I fight here (…) I think that feeling of the land is what connected him with the people.” Those obstacles, would make their audiovisual work focus on documentary works, easier to produce with very few resources, although that did not distance him from the possibility of creating future works of fiction that would continue titles such as Wake up as you can o The serp shirt, both programmed in this edition of the Mostra. “I had not abandoned the line of fiction for the documentary”, comments Loreto, his widow. “The line of the documentary began with The wings of life, continued with white lime, carbon black, but he was still passionate about fiction. In fact, There are scripts made to be filmed that have been left unmade (…) He wanted to make films in any way and, how I saw that I couldn't do certain things, said: I can do this. Toni was growing from nothing to more. Once I was involved in a project, I was going to death because I was absolutely passionate. He is passionate about cinema in all its aspects”.
