23/09/2024 - In her third film, the Spanish filmmaker touches on accompaniment in illness and how she brought the original story by Eider Rodríguez on which it is based to her own region

(© Jorge Fuembuena/SSIFF)

Spanish filmmaker Pilar Palomero won five Goya awards (including Best Film) for her debut film Schoolgirls [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Pilar Palomero
film profile], which screened at the Berlinale. Two years later La maternal [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Pilar Palomero
film profile] premiered at the San Sebastian International Film Festival, winning the award for best performance for Carla Quílez. Now she returns to the same competition with Glimmers [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Pilar Palomero
film profile], a screen adaptation of a story by Eider Rodríguez (entitled Un corazón demasiado grande) with which she felt a special connection.

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Cineuropa: How did you get into this project?
Pilar Palomero: Producer Fernando Bovaira (MOD Producciones) contacted me to adapt the literary original. I hadn't read it and I didn't know Eider's work, but as soon as I read it, I became an unconditional fan of her work. I loved the story, it really appealed to me. I then told Fernando that I didn't want to do a commission, but to bring it my region. And he agreed. We’ve worked very closely together. He has been involved in all the processes and has accompanied me a lot, as has co-producer Valérie Delpierre, who I trust enormously. But here the weight of artistic production has been carried by Bovaira. He had received this story and he wanted to turn it into a film, to make a camera piece, something intimate, because he had been very moved by it. If I hadn't been fascinated by it myself, I wouldn't have joined the project.

How did the original story appeal to you? Do you recognise something of your own experience in it?
When I read it I was fascinated by how it was written, with four characters who are walking contradictions. And the situation it raises, to which you wonder, what would I do if my daughter asked me for this favour and I have to meet someone who was my family but is now a stranger?

And that you don't really want to do it at all.
And it puts you in a complicated position. Above all, the screen adaptation allowed me to reflect on themes that have always haunted me, such as the passage of time, the legacies we leave or are left behind and, above all, how the proximity of death places us in another place in our own lives. That has to do with my own experiences. I’ve introduced in this adaptation things that I’ve felt and experienced. In fact, it is filmed in my family's village and I wrote the script based on locations that I knew well. It was important to bring the story to a familiar place and to convey things that I had felt.

During the process of writing the script there were two key references. Fernando Bovaira showed me the documentary All the Other Days [+see also:
trailer
interview: Carlos Agulló
film profile], by Carlos Agulló, about palliative care; the team that appears in that film also appears in mine. As a result, I spoke with Pablo Iglesias, the doctor who appears in Glimmers, about the subject and about what I wanted to reflect on: palliative care is there to give the best possible life until death arrives. The idea was to try to make a film where life is felt more than death, an invitation to the audience to remember that we have the present and that's it. Then there was an article, entitled Conservaos buenos, by Maribel Andrés Llamero; you are writing the script and they publish it, you read it and say “this has been written for the project”. Because she talks about the death of her father, it is a beautiful way of explaining how she says goodbye to life and how what she feels most about that goodbye is knowing that she will no longer be able to enjoy beauty and art. All these elements made me want to shoot Glimmers, plus my own experience when my father passed away.

It's easy to identify with your characters when you have lost a loved one, which is also the case in Pedro Almodóvar’s new film, The Room Next Door [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile].
And Carlos Marqués-Marcet’s, They Will Be Dust [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]. I think the fact that there are three Spanish films this year that deal with the same subject will mean something, it's a concern we have.

Finally, mother-daughter relationships appear in all three of your films.
I don't do it intentionally and it's funny because I have a very good relationship with my mother. It's something that I find interesting and it is there unconsciously. In the film I'm preparing there is also a mother-daughter relationship, because they are unique, there’s a lot of love if everything goes well, but also conflict and contradiction.

(Translated from Spanish)