20/10/2023 - The Croatian filmmaker based in Barcelona talks about her second feature film, a physical and emotional road movie set to flamenco music

Pepi Fandango [+see also:
trailer
interview: Lucija Stojević
film profile] had its world premiere at the 39th Warsaw Film Festival, held in the Polish capital from 6 to 15 October. Its director, Lucija Stojević, born in Croatia and raised in Vienna, but currently living in Spain, tackled flamenco music in her first documentary, La Chana [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] (2017), which again features in her new work, as she explains in the following interview.

Cineuropa: What attracts and connects you to Spanish culture and especially to flamenco?
Lucija Stojević: People often ask me if I specialise in flamenco, but I don’t. It was a coincidence that my two films relate to it, although I’ve always been interested in music and I discovered flamenco in Spain, which caught my eye because it’s more complex than it seems. There are many possibilities to interpret the rhythmic combinations, as there is much more than folklore. And the two films relate to flamenco in different ways.

In Pepi Fandango you discover something that isn’t widely known: how Spanish families ended up in French concentration camps.
This crossover between the Holocaust and the Spanish Civil War has not been widely explored. When people talk about concentration camps, they don’t associate it with France, which has done a good job of hiding this part of its history. When I met Pepi, the main character, and he told me about his life, I was surprised as I didn't know there were so many French concentration camps. Two historic moments crossed paths there.

The documentary is therefore a physical and, above all, an emotional journey.
Yes, a road movie with many layers. On the one hand, it’s a physical journey through modern Europe, which is forgetting its history. And on the other hand, there are the holocaust survivors, who carry that experience with them all their lives. It’s a journey through their memory, a search for a childhood that was taken away from them; that they never had and never will. It’s a terrible problem, a trauma, with no solution. There are moments of expression and communication where some temporary relief is found, but trauma is never overcome, and it’s important to think about this today with what is happening to children in Palestine and Israel.

But as the characters in your film say, singing relieves pain.
Yes, exactly. Pepi is related to Spain because he is a Sephardic Jew (who was expelled from this country centuries ago), but as a child in a concentration camp he heard how Spanish children had a tool to communicate with their parents through something cultural, like singing.

But how did you meet the two protagonists of your documentary?
Through a friend in Barcelona, whose mother is from Vienna. When I was looking for funding for La Chana, he told me that if I went to Austria I should call a lifelong friend of his, called Pepi, and who is obsessed with flamenco. I called him and he invited me to his home without knowing anything about his life. He opened the doors, we listened to flamenco and after five minutes he started to cry and told me his story. We started talking and thinking about what we could do. It was a very long process, we went on research trips and we talked a lot, especially about how the past affects the present of the main character. We revisited the script a lot with each meeting. The trip to Paterna, in Andalusia, and the very special friendship Pepi had with Alfred, a relationship of men who do not speak, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in search of something they’re not going to find, became the structure of the feature film.

Although they don't talk much, they complement each other well.
Yes, Alfred in a way becomes us, the audience, who receive the trauma and don't know how to deal with it. And he appeals to our generation, those of us who still have grandparents and relatives who lived through terrible things. In the film I also deal with the theme of memory, something subjective for which we searched for family documents and found them in Slovakia. In the archive of a director who made documentaries asking people for family archives, creating an archive from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1970s with very interesting images.

And have there been any reactions to the screening of your film at festivals?
Yes, especially from people with relatives who were in concentration camps, they were very moved when they saw it.

(Translated from Spanish by Vicky York)