premiered in Toronto, where this report was prepared, the new film by the director inheritance, rain, love, Sleepwalkers and Siamese twins It was later presented at other festivals such as San Sebastian and Biarritz, and is now shown in the Latin American competition in Mar del Plata.
Our review of The wind that blows awayPaula Hernandez is a filmmaker but also a thinker and archaeologist in human relations. Among the main ones are the bonds between mothers and daughters, husbands; from desire, from loneliness, from parental order. In the wind sweeping away, he devotes a novel by the eminent writer of Entre Rios, Silva Almada, to make it his own. This is not the first time he has adapted a piece of literature to put his mark on it and turn it into a film. The peculiarity of this occasion is that the initial germ did not come out of it. It came to him from an external proposal.
Listening to her speech, it becomes clear that the construction of her work reveals a long-term process of deep reflection, a continuity that is also reflected in the work team. Ivan Gerasenchuk is the director of photography, Lionel D’Agostino is the co-screenwriter and Rosario Suárez is the editor of his new film. All of them have already worked with Hernandez in previous films and form a kind of work and emotional fraternity.
–The wind that blows away It was a project that was offered to you, unlike your previous films. Was it hard for you to accept it? Have you read Silva Almada’s novel?
– It was absolutely amazing because of the way the project came to me. It has a mix between an on-demand project and an author’s project because when Hernán Musalupi, the producer of the film, called me, he told me “I saw Sleepwalkers and Siamese twins And I think there’s material in this novel by Silva Almada that you might be interested in because it deals with some family issues, films that focus a lot on characters and space and the idea is to read them, and if you’re interested, it’s a starting point for making the film you want.”. That was very tempting. I knew Silva Almada as an author, and I had read other novels, not this novel on schedule, so I had a lot of enthusiasm since I received the proposal. When I read it, I loved it, it had something deceptively cinematic. The novel is narrated at other times and focuses more on the character of the pastor and the gringo. It has a full temporary break. It is built from the memories and memories of the past of the four characters. That’s when I started thinking about what I’m going to do with this adaptation. Soon the character of Lenny appeared to me as a point of view, and how to know this universe a little from the point of view of the only woman present in the film. This was the first decision, to believe that I wanted to present the point of view and also to be listed in one timeline. Since then, a dialogue began with them that they accepted and grabbed, and they liked what I was proposing, so I moved forward with much freedom, almost as I look at the film today and I can think it could have arisen entirely from my original desire to adapt that novel.
What aspects of the story caught your eye at the beginning?
– It happened to me, on the one hand, I felt that Lenny was the character from whom the story was told. There was something I was working on about children’s view of the adult world, to their family’s worlds, and I found it attractive to see how this woman who is in the background of that father, in the place of observation, help, almost slavery, has at the same time an active look. This outlook can at some point generate awareness and action. That’s what I was interested in working on, and seeing how this background works. Then it was attractive for me to deal with the religious world and the rural universe. I am an atheist, I do not have a religious background, I am completely urban. So it was also kind of out of the most famous storytelling area. My films don’t deal with universes that are completely different from my universe. So, it also seemed to me that it was a leap towards a new and different path, which made me get rid of some prejudices, and try to understand this universe, those characters. Then let’s see what happens to the world of parents, how they raise these two very opposing men and how they also these men leave marks on these children. How to tell those mothers who are in the film because they left marks of their absence, without judging them, without condemning them, for not being in the lives of their children. I think those were different topics. I think the film has a lot of layers as it goes. It’s kind of a tale with some ethical dilemmas.
-In all your work, from inheritance (2001) onwards, female characters have always occupied leadership roles, but in Sleepwalkers (2019) and Siamese twins (2020) There is also exploratory work around motherhood. in The wind that blows away, on the other hand, mothers are physically absent, despite being within the characters. Do you feel that there is continuity?
“I think somehow, yes. I think it was interesting to get into the world of men, and how they raised these guys in particular. I’m obsessed with exploring how the idea of family works today, something in the Kha crisisThief and complete transformation, because there are more and more diverse forms that have nothing to do with what is expected or traditional. In this case, it was attractive to put in place that masculine view of parenting that differs in raising women. But it also happened to me a little bit with non-existent women, that there is always some kind of condemnation of non-existent mothers and men who are not there are never condemned. These two women do not exist for various reasons that are not explicit. It seems to me that one can read based on what he sees, the consequences, and how these children are. And how these children also suffer from absence. So I think so, yes, I can think that these three films somehow deal in different ways with the family relationships of fathers and sons or mothers and sons, daughters in the case of the other two films, how their signs, experiences and mandates are in their offspring.
– How was the choice of actors and how was it like working with artists with great experience such as Alfredo Castro and Sergei López and with younger others such as Joaquín Acebo and Almudina González?
– Alfredo’s character appeared very quickly, and there weren’t many options for me. It seemed to me that he must be someone who can handle this very complex thing that he does between emotional, perverted, abusive, understanding and intelligent. Alfredo is a very interesting emotional actor to work with because he likes to research and expose himself. We also had to find a balance because he is a complex character. I didn’t want to get into a wide blow, cliché, so pastor, that pastor, and it was the construction that took time. Something similar happened to me in the case of Sergey. Alfredo is also a character in which the word has enormous weight, so I could not imagine a Spaniard playing this character. In a way, it had to be someone with a connection to Latin America, South America I would say. And in the case of the other character, I liked to think that he was someone who came from afar, occupied land and that his way of living and speaking was a combination of what he brought and immersing himself in that environment. Working with them was very beautiful, remote job for a long time so we could meet. Almudena and Joaquín came out of a very long selection process, and many interviews. And there was a meeting with them, months ago, the moment of reading the script, to test some questions to find out how to find the world of the film. There was also some work regarding language. There are very different accents in the film. The film is set near the border and this somehow allowed for this mix of universes. I wanted them to have an acoustic anchor that had to do with an area we identified in Entre Ríos, in Argentine Mesopotamia, a part close to the border with Uruguay, slightly higher than Brazil and Paraguay beyond. So, we worked a lot on the sound of that area. We wouldn’t hide where the characters came from, but we would have washed their native languages, let’s say, and that they had expressions, ways of breathing, assimilating words that have something to do with that area.
Are you working on any new projects you can talk about?
– Very slowly I start a story that also concerns a daughter, a family and a step. Try to get out of the state of economic and spatial crisis, move to another place and how these children go through this process based on the idea of prosperity that never arrives.
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