17/02/2023 - We spoke with the Basque filmmaker, who has made his debut with a nostalgic film, shot in black and white

Stillness in the Storm [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Alberto Gastesi
film profile] has not yet been released in Spanish cinemas, but it has already been screened at several film festivals (San Sebastian, Gijón) before being screened in the Humans in Focus section of the seventh Ibizacinefest - International Independent Film Festival, which is being held on the Balearic island between 17 and 26 February. We spoke with its director and co-screenwriter, Alberto Gastesi, to introduce us to his debut film.

Cineuropa: Do you have a distributor yet?
Alberto Gastesi: No, not quite. It’s been a difficult journey, because we’ve been a very independent production and we started filming without even having the support of a TV network, although in the end ETB emerged. And we haven’t been in laboratories either, which is now the norm. And because we made the crazy, risky and happy decision to move ahead just a year ago, we are now suddenly within phases of the film and having to deal with them. It's been exciting, fruitful and we’re learning a lot as producers, as it’s the first film of Vidania Films. But that means we have nothing, everything is up in the air and improvised, although May would be a nice date for a premiere. And we still have an international festival pending, so it will be a film for this year in 2023.

I understand that the idea for the film came from two people who meet again in an empty flat that is for sale...
I like to hold on to that first physical idea of the space of a flat for sale, because I like to work from something tangible, the actors or the bodies, more than from an interest in telling something or conveying a sensation. But in the end this process has taken years to mull over: the passing of time and their experiences have shaped the story, so it’s no coincidence that this first film is about growing up, about the passing of time, about a key moment when the opportunities you always have open and see ahead of you when you’re young become paths that you end up closing and get left behind. And there is a certain cynical undertone with characters reflecting on not finding themselves in life against a stormy exterior. This also has to do with the fact that production coincided with the start of the war. All this is in the film, but I don't work in this way of wanting to tell something or convey an idea and from there build a story, but rather the opposite.

Did the decision to use the 4:3 format and black and white photography instead of the usual colour also stem from this?
Yes, from the beginning I wanted to make a geometric film, with faces, light and shade; I wasn’t interested in colour at all. I wanted to portray the characters in 4:3 format. There is a mixture of that idealism, a conceptual starting point, combined with the everyday. I felt I had to really explore that and do it in a personal story.

Watching (and listening to) the film we get a tone of poetry, melancholy and jazz.
Absolutely. Jazz is present in this search for its own tone, mixing a narrative of spaces, camera movements and suspense created by rhythms and with a more improvised cinema: there are scenes with non-actors where there was no script. Always being open to the fact that styles can be blended together and ultimately work: that's the jazz spirit.

It is a film with a lot of dialogue and little action, similar to the style of Rohmer.
I don't work with references, but of course there is something of the French master, but also of Hamaguchi, Wheel of Fortune and fantasy. As well as Antonioni's The Night.

Finally, did you want to portray your generation?
Yes, I think so and I was drawn to the lockdown. Me and the co-writer Álex Merino are both from San Sebastian, although we met as students at the Colegio Mayor Chaminade in Madrid, we started working during the 2008 crisis and then came the pandemic; the outlook is bleak and the prospect of moving towards a shared future has dissolved. That unease is in the characters of the film, in growing up in an erratic way, that civilizing decadence. But it is not pessimistic, because we’ll get through it.

(Translated from Spanish by Vicky York)