27/03/2025 - The Spanish filmmaker breaks down his documentary, which makes an urgent call through the story of a struggling family in Bangladesh

Spanish filmmaker Natxo Leuza turns his attention to Bangladesh, one of the most vulnerable places in the world, where climate change is palpably making people’s lives impossible. Black Water [+see also:
interview: Natxo Leuza
film profile] introduces us to Lokhi and her family, just before she has to move to Dhaka in order to find work and take care of her family. The film has screened in the HUMAN:RIGHTS Award strand of CPH:DOX.

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

Cineuropa: How did you get to meet your protagonists, Lokhi and her family?
Natxo Leuza: To gain access to our protagonists, we had the support of one of the most important institutions in Bangladesh, BRAC. It is the largest non-governmental organisation for development cooperation in the world, and I had seen Lokhi in one of their videos. She is a very strong, intelligent woman, always working different jobs to support her family, and in her house, it was clear that she was the boss. Then, unlike many of her neighbours, she knew exactly what climate change was and how it was affecting her.

You’re credited as director and writer; what was the documentary’s script like?
I wrote the script after the first trip we made to find protagonists and locations. We did a lot of interviews that formed the basis for the scriptwriting. The making of the film was a process of renegotiating our original ideas and finding a new angle from which to approach the reality we were working with. The script served as a guide, but we were always very attentive to the characters showing us their reality. I think it is there, in that tension, where the point of view of a filmmaker is eventually embodied – in the way of resolving that tension between the desire to make the film and the reality we find when we are actually shooting. The script remained very open until we got to the editing room, where one finishes shaping everything.

How did the commitment to activism inform the film’s editing?
In the editing, speeches and conversations that gave much more information about the problem disappeared, but we thought it was more interesting to see how climate change, through the strong storms, floods and erosion of the land, was affecting our protagonists so that the viewers would not receive any kind of lessons, but would instead feel the lives of millions of people who have lost everything.

Can you tell us more about mixing images of harsh reality with the more “poetic” scenes?
I personally have always liked to work on this boundary between the filmmaker's reality and fantasy. I think there is a lot of exchange, a lot of reciprocity between fiction and documentary. Fiction struggles a lot to try to make what it portrays seem real. [Those films] are always trying to generate in us the illusion that what we see is true. And at the same time, documentaries are becoming more and more sophisticated, and seem to want to look more like fiction, to distinguish themselves from what can be considered more television or reportage. In my films, I try to play with all of the possible tools to tell a story, and that's why there are always much more poetic sequences mixed in with more real sequences. The border area is very rich, and it's where I find it most interesting to work right now.

What was the camera set-up like, particularly in crowded spaces and bearing in mind the rain and flooding?
The biggest challenges were the flooding and unpredictable weather conditions. In the rural areas, where Lokhi and his family lived, one of the main challenges was the tides. There were certain times of day when the house was totally flooded and others when everything was a quagmire. In Dhaka, I remember the torrential storms. They came and left a lot of water in a very short space of time; the streets were flooded, and moving under that large amount of water was complicated, especially for cinematographer Jokin Pascual, who had to protect the camera in a thousand ways to record the storms that were so necessary for our story. We also always had lens filters ready so that the water wouldn't ruin the shot.