Barbara Wurm: Welcome, Macu and thank you for your great film, we’re looking forward to premiering it at the Forum! Lisabona from our selection team is with me for this interview.
Lisabona Rahman: Thank you, Barbara, I'm very excited about this conversation, Macu, and it was such a privilege to see your film! I want to start with asking how would you describe your relationship to the three sisters in your film?
Macu Machín: The main characters are my mother Elsa and my two aunts. They grew up in a small village on the island of La Palma. Since I was a little girl, I imagined what their life had been like in this place up in the mountains, far away. They always talked to me about the hunger they endured and what they lacked. What really fascinated me was that even though they were talking about hunger or lacking basic necessities, they still told these stories with a great deal of humour and laughter. I always remembered their humour as a way of confronting the problems in life.
When they grew up, Carmen stayed in the family home on the land where they grew up, while my mother Elsa and her younger sister Maura moved to Gran Canaria, where I also live right now. As the years passed, the whole family became more and more dispersed, more distant. But when I see the family photos of them when they were younger, I can still see this complicity between them and the connection that they have. Seeing those photos was a big influence for me when I started developing the film. I also lived outside of the Canary Islands for a while. That distance helped my memories return and created this desire to tell these stories about the connection between my mother and her sisters as well as the connection they had with the earth despite the harsh conditions, a way of living in and alongside this territory between the living and the dead, memory and the present.
LR: The film deals with inheritance both concretely and also as an abstract idea. Can you tell us why this topic is interesting for you? What does it stand for?
MM: Inheritance is very important topic in my film. When I was younger, I spent summers in the family home in La Palma, it became some kind of a ritual. It was this idea of coming together, sharing the chores, sharing the work in the fields.
When the actual inheritance, the specific dividing up of the land, was left to the three sisters, I saw it as something that pulled them apart. The idea of inheritance became more like a punishment or a curse.
As the film developed, I realised that this idea of inheritance encompasses more than just material things like the land. We also inherit lots of things from our family – frustrations, resentments, unresolved issues that jump from generation to generation. Our mission is to break out of that, to carve our own path outside of what seems to be a cycle or a dynamic we're stuck inside and to learn from it all. For me, the film itself is the real inheritance, as well as the process of making it and the generosity of my family, who let me film them and participate in their lives.
There is a whole world that exists outside of the three sisters, the birds, the earth, everything
LR: We do indeed see concrete things like the land and the family, but I feel as well that there’s something else there, something intangible or fantastical that also stems from the sound design. Can you talk about that?
MM: When I think about the land and the story, there’s always been something fantastical or magical about both, the same feeling I have when I look through my family albums. During the shooting process, it became clear that there is a whole world that exists outside of the three sisters, the birds, the earth, everything. And then I realised that all this ambient sound and these noises could give voice to many things that weren't being said between the sisters, helping to add to the sense of lack and the distance between them.
As we were shooting, an amazing surprise happened. A volcano erupted on the island. It was very painful, very tragic to a certain extent, but in terms of our story, it also served as an amazing metaphor for everything that was hidden beneath everyday life suddenly bursting forth.
BW: Which volcano is it?
MM: For a long time, the volcano didn’t have a name, it was just there on the side of the mountain that comes down towards the ocean. All of a sudden it exploded, and then it became the Tajogaite volcano.
It's hard to express what exactly separates a home movie and a film
LR: What a story! In a way, your family story was something yet to be uncovered, like the volcano. How would you describe the feelings you had when shooting with them and the methods you used?
MM: In the beginning, I would visit my parents and aunt and shoot them with my own camera to capture the different seasons and the chores that they do in the fields. I felt that the challenge of this close, intimate family story was how to bring in a crew. I was worried that I would lose the subtlety, closeness, and familiarity. But to my surprise, once we were all filming, the freshness and feeling of discovery weren't lost. The three sisters, who seemed so shy, were all of a sudden able to bring the crew into their lives. The process brought back the playful aspect of being siblings. It's something that they ended up enjoying.
My general idea was to talk about the difficult issue of inheritance and how to divide it. I wouldn't say everything that was supposed to happen in the scene. I explained the general set-up but would not dictate how things would work, which allowed the natural dynamics between the sisters to play out. It also became a way for them to work on these issues together as a kind of therapy. Also, there's always this idea of consent, as they were touching things that were difficult and taboo within the family, and we agreed that no one should do something that they didn't want to do. This was very important, especially since I was dealing with issues that matter very much to my mother and my aunts.
LR: What do you think is the difference between a home movie and a film?
MM: It was clear from the beginning that what I wanted to make a film, not a home movie, partly because I understood that I would be placing the protagonists, my family members, in delicate situations and also because I needed to figure out a way to explore tricky issues as a daughter and a niece. I ended up directing, of course, but more serving as a medium or a mediator, to address issues, to open up and let the conflict come to an end and create a different connection between them.
It's hard to express what exactly separates a home movie and a film, but it was always clear for me that the most important thing was to create a film. It's not because I don’t think highly of home movies. Naomi Kawase's film about her grandmother was very important to me and a huge influence on my work. But as I got deeper into my film, I also realised that I needed to intervene, it wasn't just about observing what happened. So it's a slightly more interventionist approach.
I used a mix of approaches depending on how things developed
BW: That’s the most intriguing aspect for me. You created a very delicate film in a family context. But the question is how? This combination of observation and mise-en-scène or the more playful parts and the memory that comes with the photos, these three elements work very well together.
MM: Each scene was slightly different, and in reality, I used a mix of approaches depending on how things developed. There were parts with a script or at least an outline, where I had themes about conflicts that I wanted to cover. And then there is information about how the land were going to be divided, which, of course, is a key element. There were scenes where there were more interventions, almost like fictional elements, to create a dynamic to enable these conversations to occur. I created these mise-en-scène structures. And then there are things that were totally invented, like things that I knew happened in the past, conversations that the sisters had had before, or things that I imagined from our family history. The trick was to create them and to put them inside these situations. Once they were in place, there were big observational sequences with lots and lots of long takes, where we'd be there until we reached the point where you could see the sisters had control over the scene. In the moments that I created this reality, if you want to call it that, this kind of nonfiction would start to play out, which was sometimes very surprising.
BW: Do we see the protagonists’ real characters in the film? Where does fiction end and real life begin?
MM: There are three very specific, unique characters. There's Elsa, my mother, who served more as a accomplice of mine and helped me follow the script in a certain way. And there was my aunt Carmen, who was more playful and would bring her own life, her own imprint into a scene. And then there’s my aunt Maura, who's an extremely important person in this film. She has a generative disease that affects her cognitive response. She's very dependent on Elsa, but she's also a totally free spirit. Sometimes when things were stuck and we weren't getting anywhere, she would come in and change everything around and move things in a way that was extremely interesting, in a way that we couldn't even imagine before. It always seemed like Maura was the one who understood the film better than anybody else. She understood the idea of forgiveness, of coming together.
It was the final piece of the puzzle that made the film come together
LR: How did the editing process go? Were the sisters involved in any way?
MM: In the editing process, I kept the sisters at a remove, at least at the beginning. It was over two years of editing across various stages. If they had been involved from the start, I might still be editing today!
It was divided into different parts. The first shoot took place right after the first lockdown in Spain ended. Afterwards, I was working with Manuel Muñoz Rivas, who's a very well-known director and editor from Spain, where it was about understanding what we had shot and what else we needed. The idea of touching on taboos and pulling out more family conflicts came up. During that time, the volcano suddenly exploded. I was right there and went with my mother to film the volcano erupting, understanding that this metaphor was extremely important for the film and how it resonates with Carmen’s life and the story. With that material, we worked on a first edit, also understanding where this natural or maybe even supernatural element of the film was going to be integrated. I wrote a new script to try to tap into this emotional world and touch on the conflicts in the final shoot.
In the next stage, another well-known Spanish film editor called Ariadna Ribas came in to help give structure to Manuel’s and my work. Structure has been the biggest challenge of this project. Making sure that everything – the idea of fragility, the quietness – can fall into place correctly.
We had to find another editor to finish the film, to give it its final form. We came across Emma Tusell, who’s another prominent Spanish editor and director. It felt like fate in some ways, as she had just moved from Madrid to the very same village in where Carmen lives. So the last part of this process was done in her studio in Puntagorda, La Palma. This connection with the territory was very helpful. By being there, Emma was able to bring out the atmosphere, find tension in minimal aspects, breaking down some of the dialogue, working with gestures and looks and combining that with the tone of that particular area of the island. It was the final piece of the puzzle that made the film come together.
BW: That's a wonderful description. How long did you work on the film altogether?
MM: All in all, I’ve been working on the film for about 15 years. I started writing it when I lived in Buenos Aires, and it's something that's accompanied me for years and years. I’m so excited to be able to share it in Berlin. It’s like giving birth to a story that I’ve carried in me for so long and see it take its first steps.
People are finding new ways of discussing this territory
BW: The last question is about your position within the Spanish film industry, also the position of filmmaking from the Canary Islands within in the wider landscape of Spanish cinematography, which has seen a lot of growth recently. Carla Simon’s ALCARRÀS won the Golden Bear, for example. There are a lot of films that focus on caretaking, on collectives, on family issues, on land, non-urban spaces, and they are very humanistic, just like your film. How do you see yourself in this context? And did this place and its geography also play a role in reflecting on marginalised positions on a broader level?
MM: It's an interesting question, a big one too, this idea of Canarian cinema. It's important and exciting to hear these questions posed, because this new wave is recent, this new group of young filmmakers who are from the Canary Islands and who have been making specific films about the islands over the last 20 years. There's a new generation, some directors who are older and some directors who are younger, who have ideas and are also transforming the idea of the territory and what the territory means in the Canary Islands too. I think the Canary Islands are known in general as a tourism paradise, a place to go to spend one's vacation. But beyond that, people are finding new ways of discussing this territory. And some of these way are also very political, going against the general idea about what it means to live there. This spurs me on, there are so many stories to tell. This territory has always been on the edge of Europe and of Spain. I tell a story about women who have in many ways been pushed to the outskirts of the discourse, a view of life on the margins, in the outskirts. Stories from the Canary Islands are very interesting and very powerful.
Spanish-English interpretation: Jamie Weiss.
