09/09/2021 - VENICE 2021: One Galician filmmaker and another from the Canary Islands make up this hard-working tandem of artists, who have made their feature debut with a Spanish-Colombian co-production

(© Settimana Internazionale della Critica di Venezia)

World-premiering their debut film at the Venice Film Festival, no less, in its accompanying International Film Critics’ Week, is a feat that has just been achieved by duo Helena Girón and Samuel M Delgado with They Carry Death [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Samuel M Delgado and Helena…
film profile], a title that highlights the absurdity of social concepts that we’ve been dragging around for centuries. We chatted to them after the press screening of the movie at the Italian gathering.

Cineuropa: Your proposition is far from conventional – it’s actually rather daring. What were your impressions following the screening?
Samuel M Delgado: We had good impressions regarding the peculiarities of the film, as nobody expects it to be a canonical movie in the sense of using well-worn models of representation, but when you consider the sensuality that it can offer, it seems like people are really able to get into it, which makes us so happy because after such a long, and sometimes lonely, process, to finally be able to share it and feel like you’re connecting with the viewers is a real rush.

Helena Girón: We’re very happy to be here. Samuel was here two years ago with Théo Court’s film White on White [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Théo Court
film profile], for which he worked on the script, and I came along with him.

In addition, Beatrice Fiorentino, the General Delegate of the International Film Critics’ Week, waxed lyrical about your movie in her interview with Cineuropa [see the interview].
SMD: She was behind the film from the very start, so it makes you very happy when you go to a place where there is so much love for it.

Although the movie was filmed in the Galician language, it’s a co-production with Colombia. How did this country get on board as a partner?
HG: Because Carlos E García, a sound designer and a producer at the outfit Blond Indian Films, is a great friend of El Viaje Films and wanted to get involved in our film. He did some sterling work despite being so far away, as in the end, COVID-19 thwarted our plans and problems came up when we wanted to wrap the film in person. But he was deeply involved, and that’s what threw up the possibility of getting him on board as a co-producer.

You mentioned the accursed pandemic… How else did it affect They Carry Death?
HG: When we were finishing off the edit, we had to do it remotely, and the lockdown hit when the movie was almost finished, which meant that, in the end, you have to adopt a different point of view.

SMD: It dramatically affected post-production, a process which is normally very swift on a film of this magnitude, but instead of being detrimental, it wasn’t such a hindrance for us.

The poster is very suggestive and is pretty unconventional [check it out here].
SMD: We worked with an illustrator friend of ours, Mario Rivière, whom we knew on account of his record sleeves and book covers, and we made it by starting from the feeling he got from the film. He saw it and started to chuck suggestions at us, as we were sure that what we didn’t want was your typical poster, in the sense of a photograph with accompanying text, but rather something more than that, something that would evoke the sensitive universe in They Carry Death: a kind of subterranean movement that emerges forth from the earth, and that’s a complicated thing to capture unless you do it with a drawing or with a more out-there style.

Your film bears the unmistakable hallmark of production company El Viaje Films.
SMD: Yes, because apart from being the producer, José Ángel Alayón was the DoP on the feature, and I’ve spent more than a decade working with him as a screenwriter, but in addition to that, on our previous works, he was a friend who was very much a part of the creative processes behind them. He’s someone with whom we communicate in a very organic way, and he helped us to be able to work and focus on the tasks that were more daunting to us, like working with the actors or the mise-en-scène. Having an ally behind the camera makes the process much easier.

Manuel Muñoz Rivas, the director of The Sea Stares at Us From Afar [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Manuel Muñoz Rivas
film profile], was also entrusted with the editing.
HG: Manolo was also a confidant of ours, and we showed him our previous short films, as we’ve known him for years. At the end of the day, it’s a film that we made with many friends.

SMD: Given that it was a very important step for us in terms of the size of the production and the ambitious nature of the project, we were lucky that we were able to make it with our friends, and we had the best of both worlds: we had good producers and a very like-minded team.

(Translated from Spanish)