28/09/2023 - The Argentinean filmmaker premieres her debut feature, a heartfelt teenage chronicle that won an award two years ago at the Co-Production Forum of this Basque festival

Alemania [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: María Zanetti
film profile] is the feature directorial debut of the Argentinian María Zanetti, who has come to present it at the Horizontes Latinos section of the 71st San Sebastián International Film Festival, and who we spoke to at the María Cristina Hotel hours before the world premiere.

Cineuropa: Were you here defending this project at the Co-Production Forum, where it won the Artekino International Prize?
María Zanetti: No, because of the pandemic. But here I am, enjoying the rematch, luckily.

What inspired you to tell such an intimate and personal story as the one in Alemania?
I wrote it during Covid. I was going through a painful time and I felt the need to complete that emotional memory brought back by photos that I went over and some questions I asked myself about my adolescence, wanting to look into that; it was a need that came from deep inside. And I started to write, not a script at first, but the film started to grow out of this. It came out of trying to understand things from when I was a child. How I processed pain in that particular and vital stage of life, adolescence.

You talk in the film about grief and mourning, because everyone handles it differently.
Grieving the death of a sibling is a hard thing to process, I’m still doing it several years later. And during the pandemic, which brings you so deep inside, in that silence that prevailed, I decided to dive fully into it, but from the adolescent point of view, because I think that at that moment I experience it all with fewer layers. As you get older, you put a wall up with your emotions, so that they don't have as great an impact. So not only do I talk about the bond with a sister who suffers from a mental disorder, but also how her teenage sister Lola deals with what she is seeing and experiencing, and how she seeks her own experiences that will make her mature. There are circumstances in life that stay with you. She is 16 years old and suddenly she has to behave like an adult in certain circumstances and she doesn't want to. So, she wants to leave home in order to experience her adolescence with autonomy and freedom.

So, you were a teenager who had to grow up before your time?
In some ways yes, in others I was more immature. I find the great metamorphosis of adolescence very appealing. In this phase we are many things, with less awareness and little control. Although this phase of life is often told in films, what was unique was portraying it from the point of view of an ordinary teenager and how this circumstance and this bond with her older sister, who is going through a nervous breakdown, impacts her life.

Has the whole creative process of the film served as therapy for you?
More than therapy, it makes me ask myself other questions, to understand a bit more about myself. The scar is always there, there’s not something that heals, but something that is transformed and given a new meaning. There are other ways of looking at what I was. Lola, the protagonist, isn’t me, but the product of an adult view of my adolescence. It isn’t something real, but the interpretation of something, like dreams, it is a strange mixture of emotional memory and fiction.

Although you talk about pain, grief and mental illness, Alemania is not a sad film.
In the hard and painful moments of my life, that same day something light-hearted happened to me and I laughed. For my family a sense of humour is very important. The character doesn't want to hold on to the pain, because life isn’t just that, but a lot of things that go through you and, suddenly, you're at a wake telling a joke with friends. Alemania is about a person at a specific moment in time, experiencing different situations.

Why Germany as a title and not another European country?
Because I went to a German school and they had exchanges with Germany. I myself went. That journey was an eye-opening one and the character also needed to leave home, get some air and regain some perspective. The protagonist knows what she needs to survive. Travelling allows you to come back in a different way. In another country you can be different and that freedom to be with strangers in other countries, reflecting yourself in others in a way you didn't before, enriches your view of the world and others. We live in such small worlds and we need to open them up and fill them with differences.

(Translated from Spanish by Vicky York)