Barbara Wurm: Welcome Yennifer, and welcome Rebeca Gutiérrez, who has kindly agreed to interpret for this interview.
Rebeca Gutiérrez: I’m the Chilean co-producer. We are in the sound studio right now, finishing the mixing of the songs.
BW: Thank you for taking the break. We need your great film to have good sound!
RG: Yes, I’m from Chile, so when I visited Medellín for the shooting, I was very surprised about the sounds of the city. It’s very crowded and there’s a lot of music everywhere.
Christiane Büchner: Maybe we can start with sound, because we just brought it up and you are in the sound studio right now. Let’s talk about how you use entire city soundscape, including the music but not only that, to fold your main character, Sandra, into the urban space.
Yennifer Uribe Alzate: From the beginning of the development phase, I thought of this story as being told through Sandra, the whole city being narrated through Sandra. So that was the beginning of the concept for the sound. The city is a very dramatic space in the movie. The city and its different places, the neighbourhood, the bus, the shopping centre ... and her house. I didn’t want the different places and locations to compete with Sandra as the protagonist. We tried to position Sandra almost as a sort of documentarian for us to show and observe the city and all those places in the film. For me, film sound is very important, because its potential has to be infinite, eternal. It was a really central storytelling element to construct these places and stories
CB: While I was watching the film, I was interested in Sandra the whole time, already from the first long scene in the bus. I kept hoping nothing bad would happen. But there was no robbery in the mall, there were no gangsters where she lives, all these tropes we might expect. I was always interested in what was going to happen next, and I couldn’t predict it. How did you develop the script?
YUA: For me, the quotidian is very important, everyday life. Every day a lot of things can happen. In real life, we don’t actually experience the big events, the ones that classical cinema shows us. The narrative is not classical in my film, there is not the usual dramatic structure that keeps building and puts one event after the other. I have a more feminine kind of narration. The “hero’s journey” is a very hegemonic, macho narrative tradition. I have another way of proposing a story in cinema, a more female perspective on the story.
It was important that she had acting experience, as she is in all scenes of the movie, she has an important function as its dramatic weight
CB: Let’s talk about your marvellous actress who plays Sandra. What can you tell us about her? How did you come to work with her?
YUA: Our team in Colombia started the casting in 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. We had to do casting by Zoom. But I was able to meet Alba, the actress, for a coffee and talk to her in person. It was very important to see her, listen to her and meet her in person during the pandemic. I saw a lot of women, but Alba was my favourite, she had all the characteristics I wanted. She has teenage kids herself, her life is even similar to Sandra’s. Alba is a theatre actress, she had no experience in cinema. But it was important that she had acting experience, as she is in all scenes of the movie, she has an important function as a dramatic weight of the movie.
CB: Did you rehearse a lot?
RG: The rehearsals took place over a whole year. Alba took a course for security guards. She has a license now! Yes, she’s an official guard and the production company paid for her training.
CB: Very cool. When we see her in the film as a security guard in her uniform, she looks so proud and so self-assured in that position and also in that clothing. So that was also real.
YUA: During the development of the film, I did a lot of interviews with security guards, and a lot of women told me that the uniform empowered them and they felt confident. Sandra did too, in the film, just as Alba did in real life.
Fabian Tietke: Were all the traits of Sandra’s character already there, or did the actress introduce any that you weren’t thinking of before when you cast her?
YUA: I constructed the character of Sandra together with Alba, but they don’t have the same personality. They are actually quite different. Once Alba had already got into the role of Sandra, it was only then her character seemed to cross paths with that of the actress. The shooting was very difficult, as we had to shoot during the pandemic and in a certain way we had to do it like a period piece, we had to erase all the traces of the masks, etc, reconstruct another reality, another normality, the pre-pandemic one. We had to do PCR tests all the time.
It was about proprioception, the sense of being conscious of your own body, recognising your movements and your size and everything
CB: There is something very interesting about the actress, that she has such a strong physical presence in every scene, no matter whether you see her in a close up or from upstairs somewhere in the mall. How did you work with her? I would have assumed that Alba is also a dancer. How did you direct her? When is the body more important? And when is the text?
YUA: We had a lot of rehearsals with her. I filmed Alba in two ways, how she was when she was rehearsing and how she was when we observed her in real life. I showed her the recordings and compared how she moved in real life and when she was acting for the movie. It was about proprioception, the sense of being conscious of your own body, recognising your movements and your size and everything. I also got a real uniform for Alba, which she put on, including the boots, and she walked in the street to rehearse impersonating a guard. That was an exercise in real life, also with the suit, the uniform.
FT: I would like to link that back to what we talked about in terms of sound. Sometimes it even seems as if the sounds of the surrounding atmosphere give her or open up the space for her to be herself. For example, when she sits next to the driver in the bus she’s very present in that moment, but she doesn’t say a word. It’s just the surroundings that you hear. I was wondering, how did you record these sounds? Were these actually recorded at that specific moment? And were you actually thinking about how to portray a person that is very silent as a protagonist?
RG: Right now we are finishing the sound design and the mix. There are two kinds of sound. The main one is the direct sound – coming from Chile, we are all totally surprised about the urban soundscapes of Medellín. Our sound person recorded a lot of raw tracks, but also a lot of staged ones. Now we are constructing the environment of the city – and it’s turning out very realistic. The city of Medellín sounds very much like the movie.
YUA: We described all the sounds in the script in detail. The director of sound was surprised about my description of sounds when I developed the plot. It is a very sonic film, from the beginning onward. Fabian says Sandra does not always talk, but she expresses herself with her body and the sounds complete the sensation. As we said in the beginning, we feel the city through Sandra, but also the city becomes folded, wrapped around Sandra to tell the story and complete the feelings.
RG: I would like to add what we talked about. Yennifer told me that none of the characters suffers in this film. For her this was very important. It is true, as Christiane said, that we are waiting for danger and suffering to appear, but nothing of the kind happens. Sandra is very quiet, her reactions are very quiet. She doesn’t react violently or dramatically. She is chilled, in a way.
YUA: I deliberately avoided an affective storytelling style. I think the film is a kind of invitation to meet the city, to meet Sandra, to feel out some places in Colombia through this woman. Because she is the kind of woman who is not usually portrayed. My approach to storytelling very much works via the senses.
I want to confront this narrative via showing a different feminine body
CB: You succeeded, that’s for sure. When you say that this kind of women is rarely depicted in a film in Colombia …
YUA: … Yes, it is not usual for us to see them as main characters in a film. We do see them, also in Colombian cinema, but never as main protagonists.
CB: Maybe we see them, but in a different context, as being poor or suffering. Sandra might be not well off, but she’s not suffering. She is observing her surroundings and making decisions, we can see her do that. Also, I have the impression that you show parts of the city which are usually not depicted, especially not in this way. Where are we in Medellín in the film?
YUA: Medellín is situated in a valley, surrounded by hills. It’s very green, and this neighbourhood is at the foot of one of the hills. Its name is Belén Las Violetas. We even worked a lot in my own neighbourhood. I involved local people in the production, both behind and in front of the camera. There are a lot of extras or secondary actors from the neighbourhood. Many of them worked as crew members. Medellín is not the capital of Colombia. When we scouted locations, we visited a lot of places in Medellín. But in the end, we chose my own neighbourhood, as a totally atypical place compared to what is traditionally shown in Colombian cinema.
FT: How would you describe the difference between your way of portraying Medellín and the usual way? I guess we don’t know Colombian cinema all too well.
RG: There’s a tradition in cinema to show Colombia with violence. Sorry, but Medellín is the city of Pablo Escobar, narcos, drugs.
YUA: This cinema also has other kinds of women. I want to confront this narrative via showing a different feminine body. In Medellín, we are used to certain silhouettes of Colombian women, very curvy, a type of perfection, like a Colombian Barbie. I show a very different kind of Colombian woman. The people from Medellín are called Paisas. This is another kind of Paisa woman. She is a single mother, a worker. I don’t want to show her suffering as a single mother, or not having enough money. I want to focus on her desire, on the desire of the people, so lunch time becomes important.
CB: Rebeca, one question to you, as one of the producers. When you first read the script or when you met Yennifer, what whet your appetite for this project?
RG: I met Yennifer at the Bogotá Audiovisual Market, where she was presenting this project. And the first thing to attract me was that it was one out of two projects in the co-production market directed by a woman. I focused on that. I worked for three years on a very similar project in the south of Chile, with another director, who quit the project after three years of development. It was a story about a woman in a bus, but she was more evangelical and suffered. When I came across Yennifer’s project, I actually thought it was the same project, just with another perspective on female empowerment. I was interested in her script, as for me it was like a second chance. Plus, I wanted to do a co-production, in this case with Alexander Arbelaez Osorio, who I had met in Medellín in 2020. Co-productions in Latin America are important, we can make new stories by putting together different elements to combine our backgrounds, and we work with female directors. In Chile, we have female directors, but the most famous ones work in documentary. For me, fiction is the place we need to conquer. We are now here with Romina Cano, the sound mixer, who is a woman as well, like the director of photography and the art director. It’s a very female team, a very comfortable way to work. It was a very good experience for me and I think for the team too.
CB: Wonderful. That’s a very good ending for our interview.
RG: Thank you very much.
YUA: Thank you. Gracias. Muchas gracias.
