Under Reconstruction: The Circles of the Pompeu Fabra Master
Gerwin Tamsma
It isn’t very often that the Rotterdam Film Festival dedicates a programme to a film course. The Màster en Documental de Creació of the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona is indeed a very special course. Since its foundation in 1998, (former) students and lecturers have produced a constant stream of films with a recognisable and original signature. Many students and teachers help each other in bringing about productions, as a result of which interesting cross-links have emerged, not only in approach but also in theme. For instance, many of the films are about reconstructing lost identity, and the film makers and producers often take plenty of time to shoot their films. The inspiring consequence of a good master-pupil relationship forms a connecting thread in this programme.
In the last decade, the Rotterdam Film Festival has shown several films from the Màster en Documental de Creació of the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. The best known is the historic documentary Work in Progress (En construcción) by José Luis Guerín. A teacher at the Pompeu Fabra, Guerín used his students to make it possible to extend the shooting period and above all to shoot large amounts of material to make his film about demolition, new construction and the inhabitants of the Barcelona district El Xino.
Mercedes Álvarez was one of the editors of Work in Progress. A few years later, she completed an unusual documentary project that was also a contemplation about personal stories and identity related to the passing of time, changing populations and origins. Álvarez’ El cielo gira, which won a Tiger Award at IFFR 2005, was about a remote village in the north of Spain where Álvarez was the very last baby born.
The third film from the Pompeu Fabra Master that was screened (in competition) in recent years in Rotterdam is Isaki Lacuesta’s The Legend of Time (La leyenda del tiempo): a restrained, benevolent and intelligently observed meditation about sorrow and loss, identity and self-expression.
This year the Festival is showing a new film by Lacuesta, who now also teaches at the Pompeu Fabra Master: The Damned (Los condenados). This intense moral fable about the dilemma of remaining silent or speaking out is undoubtedly a fiction film, but with its themes such as reminiscence and reconstruction and its poetic style, the film also closely fits in with Lacuesta’s documentaries.
The films of José Luis Guerín, Mercedes Álvarez and Isaki Lacuesta at the IFFR together formed the motivation to compile a programme around the Pompeu Fabra Master. Also essential is the work and person of Joaquim Jordà, who died in 2006. Many of the film makers in this programme worked with him and were influenced by his films, for instance by essential concepts from Jordà’s oeuvre – the tension between reality and fiction, between identity and differentness.
This programme limits itself, with one exception, to a tour of the most recent work by former students, teachers and those involved with the course. And then it becomes apparent that there are many links between them in the choice of subject and cinematographic approach. For instance, there is Carla Subirana, who cooperated with Jordà on Alixia en el país de las agnosias. Jordà made this film after he had suffered a stroke. The film is about the influence of a stroke on the memory and cognition.
Subirana’s own film, Swimming ( Nadar), is a sublime reconnaissance of the same field, with a very personal approach: her mother and grandmother both had Alzheimer’s disease in a period when Subirana was fascinated by their mysterious silence about the execution of her grandfather in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War.
Subirana was also co-writer of Tierra negra, an award-winning film by another important but less well known Pompeu Fabra teacher: Ricardo Íscar. His beautiful new film Dance to the Spirits (Dansa als esperits), which is having its world premiere in Rotterdam this year, also offers a reflection on illness and health, but then seen from the African jungle. The film was co-produced by Pere Portebella’s Films59. And Portebella’s Removal (Mudanza) is also vying for a Tiger Award for short film.
Abel Garcia Roure, one of the spiders in the Pompeu Fabra web, was assistant to Guerín, Subirana, Lacuesta and Mercedes Álvarez among others. His penetrating A Certain Truth (Una cierta verdad) is (also) about sickness and identity. Just like the film makers he assisted, he took plenty of time to follow several schizophrenia patients. You can see this investment in time reflected in the film.
Eva Vila, film maker and coordinator of the Master, also took time for her film B-Side, a kaleidoscopic impression of the music scene in Barcelona. The shooting took longer than a year and Vila was helped by students at the course. The other coordinator of the course is Marta Andreu. She has her own company, Estudi Playtime, with which she produced the poetic travelogue The Land Inhabited (La terra habitada) by Anna Sanmarti (former assistant to Joaquim Jordà).
Another former student who worked on several films with Jordà is Germán Berger. In this programme, you can see his second full-length film My Life with Carlos (Mi vida con Carlos), a documentary constructed as intimate fiction about his father who was murdered in Pinochet’s Chile and above all about the consequences of that murder in the present.
Together with Lucas Vermal, Santiago Fillol, former student and now a teacher at the Master, realised the film Ich bin Enric Marco, a fascinating combination of travelogue and confessional documentary about a Spanish prisoner of war who exaggerated his persecution by the Germans.
And we would also like to focus your attention on Victor Garcia’s The Former Boxer (El Ex-boxeador), a contemplative study of a former boxing champion. Garcia, once a student of the Master course and also influenced as film maker by both Jordà and Guerín, but also by Warhol and Raya Martin, made a modern low-budget film about a place and a face – unusual enough without mentioning the supporting cast of the protagonist for a moment.
Many other film makers linked to the Master are not included here. I hope that other films will soon be screened in a larger survey. This would include work by Neus Ballús, Raul Cuevas, Victor Iriarte, Nacho Martin, Sebastian Martinez, Gonzales Morandi, Lupe Perez, Oscar Perez, Ariadna Pujol, Marc Recha, Sandra Ruesga, Paco Toledo, Nuria Aidelman & Gonzalo de Lucas, etc. Finally, the founder and director of the course, Jordi Ballo, should be complimented for what he has achieved.