Alicia G. Arribas I Málaga, (EFE) long career” where the important thing, “in the end, is the box of DVDs that you leave behind as a director. And I want to make movies all my life.”
The 37-year-old filmmaker is the only Spanish director to have won the Golden Bear in Berlin with her second feature film, “Alcarrás”, a film that launched Spain’s race towards the Oscars and which achieved eleven Award nominations. Goya 2023.
His first film, “Verano 1993” (2017), which also premiered at the Berlinale, where it won the award for best debut film and the Generation Kplus grand jury prize, won the Biznaga de Oro at the 20th Festival in Malaga, represented to Spain at the Oscars, has been nominated for the EFA and won three Goyas.
Now he is collecting a “very nice” award in Malaga, because it is for his career, but not only for the one you have done, but also for the one that is coming.
Carla Simón talks about the pressure she felt when “Verano 1993” ended and “Alcarrás” began; a hurry that she, now, after being a mother, she has managed to put in the background.
“Summer 1993” by Carla Simón
“It makes no sense to run, in the end -he says- for us as filmmakers the most important thing is that one film opens the door for the next one, and that is a privilege, knowing that we are there and that we are going to be able to make the next one” .
And to feel “that you personally grow in each project you do, that you set yourself new challenges, that you try things that are new, and make it coherent. That there is a speech and that this speech tells the things that you wanted to share in your life ”.
“Summer 1993” is the spearhead for the world of cinema to open its eyes to new and young filmmakers who had a lot to tell; but Simón finds it “a little difficult” to think that she has been the one who has opened doors for other directors “because I feel that they also opened them for me.”
“I think of Mar Coll, for example, whose first film (“Tres dies amb la familia”, 2009) was very important for me. When I saw her I thought, ‘oh my gosh, this can be done, a young woman can do it’”.
Sometimes, she says, she thinks that what happened with ‘Summer 1993’ was exceptional because “it had been a while since I had seen a debut feature by a woman, and it was the first and the only one for a while”.
film schools
“But this was already cooking. I like to think of it as a wave of female filmmakers who were already preparing their movies and all of a sudden all that work came out,” she notes.
He also believes that film schools “have a lot to do with it”; Simón, who studied at the Autónoma de Barcelona and won, along with Mikel Gurrea (nominated for a Goya this year with his debut feature “Suro”), a Caixa scholarship to study in London, at the London Film School.
“There we also coincided with Álvaro Gago”, recalls Simón, curiously one of the favorites this year to win the Biznaga de Oro 2023 with his “Matria”.
“Yes, it’s nice how we’ve all continued,” smiles the Catalan director Carla Simón.
A long career in cinema
“Now we talk a lot about the issue of rurality, about why this cinema is becoming more rural and I relate it precisely to the fact that middle-class people like us, raised in a town, go to study abroad and then we retold our stories there. It’s nice to also tell the ruralities inside, she reflects.
“It’s a long career to make movies, I want to make movies all my life, feeling pressure doesn’t get you anywhere. I am there, learning to manage it and understanding that each film is a new adventure: some will be better, others worse, but what is important, in the end, is the box of DVDs that you leave behind as director. That it have coherence and a discourse, and that it tell the things that you wanted to share in your life ”, he sums up.
He shares that now his time passes between his son Mané and writing a project “which I consider to be lighter than that of “Alcarrás” -because ‘Alcarrás’ was very hard, he says- and I fancy something that is a little fresher ”.
What will not change is the theme of the family and their personal experiences, a project that is maturing as the closing of the family trilogy, “Romería”. EFE