A family road trip is the subject of Tiger competitor Thursday Till Sunday. Its director talks to Edward Lawrenson
The initial idea for Chilean writer-director Dominga Sotomayor’s debut feature came when she was rifling through some old photographs of her childhood holidays. “I was looking through pictures of family trips and I found this shot of the kids on the roof of a car. I liked the polarity of the shot, with us children on the outside and parents in the car. I felt how dangerous and how amazing this was at the same time.”
The image provides a signature moment in Sotomayor’s movie. Charting a holiday to a desert in the north of Chile,
Thursday Till Sunday charts the road trip taken by siblings ten-year-old Lucia (Santi Ahumada) and seven-year-old Manuel (Emilano Freifeld) with their parents. Inspired by that childhood photo, Sotomayor shows Lucia sitting on the roof of their battered Mazda observing her mother and father engaged in a furious (though unheard) argument. As the quietly watchful Lucia witnesses more and more of her parents’ fractious behaviour, the film develops into a poignant child’s-eye view of marital break-up. “It’s autobiographical in a way,” says Sotomayor, “My parents did separate, but we didn’t have this exact trip.”
The shoot was a challenge, especially for a first-time feature director. For one, Sotomayor was determined to shoot on film. Filmed by talented Uruguayan director of photography Barbara Alvarez (
The Headless Woman), the movie captures the changing landscapes Lucia and her family travel through with a delicately lyrical touch. “It was one of my fights with the production,” she laughs of her decision to shoot on 16mm, “It was bit of a crazy decision because it was my first feature. It was obviously easier to make it in digital, but I wasn’t afraid about not having a lot of material, so it was OK. I really wanted to work with limitations.”
Using young, non-professional actors, she entices from her pre-teen cast performances of real naturalism and warmth. “At the beginning, they didn’t have the script,” she says of her approach to directing the kids. “Twenty minutes before shooting we’d have a little run-through with Santi and the adult actors. But Emaliano didn’t really understand what was happening.” At one point Emaliano plays a game with the actors playing his parents, asking them to guess the identity of a well-known person he is thinking of. “Everything was written”, remembers Sotomayor, “but he’s actually playing for a real.”
Sotomayor is thankful for the support she received from the Hubert Bals Fund: “It was important for development because I could make a research trip to the north.” She also singles out the help provided by Dutch co-producer Stienette Bosklopper, an early advocate of Sotomayor’s writing. “It’s not a super-strange film, but it’s a radical pitch,” she says of her fragmentary approach to writing. Given the film’s autobiographical roots, what did Sotomayor’s family think of
Thursday Till Sunday?
“They were really emotional. The characters aren’t exactly them, but there’s a familiarity there. My father, who can be really critical, was crying!”
More about Thursday Till Sunday here.