Nacho A Villar and Luis Rojo • Directors of La mala familia
“People are demanding representations of reality that are more honest and closer to the truth”
- The directorial duo have been garnering praise at festivals of the likes of Seville and IFFR for their documentary about a group of friends whose destinies are upended by an altercation
A film spanning two time periods, La mala familia [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Nacho A Villar and Luis Rojo
film profile] recounts what happens to a group of friends in the wake of an altercation that lands them in court. This has an impact on their destinies and, above all, their feelings of belonging to a brotherhood. Shortly before its release in Spanish movie theatres, scheduled for 5 May courtesy of Elamedia, the feature directed by Nacho A Villar and Luis Rojo, from the BRBR collective, has been presented in the Panorama España section of the 22nd Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival, where we met up with them.
Cineuropa: Why do you think your film connects so strongly with audiences?
Nacho A Villar: We’re a little overwhelmed, especially because we had so many doubts about how to finish the film and how people would receive it. In addition, we always assume the worst, and in the end, everything that could have gone well is going well, which is unheard of in our career, and we just find it incredible. There must be an element of luck, and it must have tied in with a series of things that people wanted to see.
Which things?
NAV: We are living in a moment of post-truth, of deciding what’s real and what’s fake. People from different places, in different ways, are demanding representations [of reality] that are more honest and more in line with what they want to tell, like the representation of someone who has really lived through what they are recounting.
And on top of that, it has been selected at a host of festivals.
Luis Rojo: It was made with the ambition of it breaking through and reaching everyone, and the aim was for people to be able to enjoy it. It was shot in order to bring different identities, and indeed everyone, closer together. I think that, as part and parcel of this, precisely because of this moment now when we’re searching for a certain sensation of reality and we want to be able to know things from an honest perspective, it’s a film that fits into what many festivals are looking for right now.
NAV: It’s a festival-orientated film because, on a formal level, it’s appealing, gutsy and cinematic; it will work at festivals because it will enrich a programme where people can discuss what cinema is, and how it fits in with various genres and other things, but at the same time, as Luis says, its ambition is to reach any type of person, from the film buff in search of new ways of understanding cinema to the kids from our neighbourhood, who enjoy it and feel as though it belongs to them. At Seville, we screened it in front of children from local schools, and through their questions, we could feel how it connected with them. It was a relief to see that people extraneous to us received the film that way, and it made us feel satisfied that we had managed to make it applicable to everyone.
It also connects with people because it uses a modern visual language, such as in its use of mobile phones.
NAV: How do you represent reality? We could have opted to reconstruct certain moments, but we decided to use forms that would encompass that reality: that’s why we drew heavily on a WhatsApp group that we have with the boys, where we send each other videos from work or from home.
You’re a collective, dubbed BRBR. What did you do before that?
LR: We started off in the world of urban music in Madrid, and we first approached the camera with the desire to film in a very close-up relationship, in a very direct way. After that, we started to do grander things, always with a vision that went beyond placing images in a rapper’s music video, attempting to adopt a more overarching gaze, and from that point on, we gradually got stronger and gained more supporters. It’s a way of understanding how to make cinema and create a shared sensibility.
NAV: What united us was our respective desires to come closer to the world of cinema, telling small stories through our music videos.
To wrap things up, let me ask you the typical – and topical – question that directorial duos are usually asked. How do you split the tasks during the shoot and (post-)production?
NAV: We prefer not to split things. For us, co-directing is the sum of our strengths; we have each other to lean on, we know each other well, and there’s a lot of talking going on behind the scenes. We are 32 years old, we met in Madrid, and even though Luis now lives in London and I live in Tenerife, we work together every day via video call.
(Translated from Spanish)
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