26/04/2023 - The Spanish filmmaker talks about his immersive and sensorial feature debut, shot during the world-famous San Fermín festival

(© Festival de Cine Internacional de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria)

Forty-two-year-old Carlos Pardo Ros, born in Zaragoza, was recently at the 22^nd Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival to take part in the Panorama España section with his feature debut, H [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Carlos Pardo Ros
film profile]. Shot with various mobile phones over ten days during the world-famous, Pamplona-based San Fermín festival, it won an award at the Seville Film Festival. Now, it has flown across to the Jeonju Film Festival, where this immersive and sensorial movie will be screened before hitting Spanish cinemas on 23 June, distributed by Vitrine Filmes.

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Cineuropa: Your film is an immersive experience, without any traditional plot to speak of…
Carlos Pardo Ros: It’s a proposition that has a very fine narrative thread. It’s more of an experience, giving you this feeling of extreme giddiness, a sensation of aggressiveness and violence, but also of solitude and love… It’s a whole tangle of emotions that can bubble up as you watch it. It’s more about that than what it can narrate; it recounts things, but not in a conventional way.

At the festivals it has taken part in, you must have encountered some extreme and unexpected interpretations from audiences.
They are usually quite visceral, and the post-screening conversations are tricky. I would ideally like to leave the screen totally black for five minutes after the screening so that the audience can slowly make their way out of the cinema, because the film ends and you’re still a bit discombobulated after what you’ve just witnessed. Many people feel these emotions rearing their heads within them, like links with the ghosts from their past, or with things they had been disconnected from. It lifts the viewer up to a mystical plane, after first dealing with earthly matters, as represented by the people partying during San Fermín: from there, it grabs hold of them and whisks them away to some strange places. It also produces some extreme reactions, with people not being able to stand it; the movie has its audience, but I knew that other people would steer clear of it. I didn’t want to make anything extreme, but rather something emotional. Nor did I invent anything, as there are other titles out there that are constructed in a similar way, but I knew it would have a picky audience.

Did the film itself, after it was shot and edited, alter the original idea you started off with?
What we had from the start was flexible: the initial idea was quite delicate, based on the death of my uncle and the motif of shooting with various mobile phones. From that staring point, there were topics that I wanted to include, but I let myself get carried away by sensations during the shoot. I talked a great deal with the team about what we were experiencing as we shot, and all of that enabled the film to take shape. We allowed the images to mould the film into what it was going to be. I tried to write a screenplay prior to the shoot, but it made no sense, because this movie could not be explained until we had images. That meant that securing support to get the project off the ground was complicated, as it was difficult to explain, and on top of that, as I was a first-time director, nobody wanted to listen to me. But we made the film that we wanted to make.

Were you motivated by the mysterious death of your uncle?
The initial driving force was that event, but above all, it was the fantasy and fiction that existed around it: as a filmmaker, what I was most interested in was fantasising about that. It had to happen in Pamplona and at the same time of day as when my uncle got lost, before his tragic death. Everything else was built on that foundation. It was a game, toying with the fiction of memory: if memory is fickle, because everyone gradually changes their ideas, I wanted to completely transform the memory of my family and portray something separate from the story of H (the initial of my uncle’s name), but still connected to it at the same time. For that very reason, we built up the soundtrack starting with sounds unconnected to the shoot (because the noise of the parties in Pamplona was just a deafening racket), but so that they would still accompany it. In this way, the idea of the hovering ghosts present in the film comes through via that added sound, as it turns those otherworldly images of people partying in Pamplona into something quite phantasmagorical.

(Translated from Spanish)