Master filmmaker José Luis Guerín returns to the San Sebastián Film Festival, to its Official Competition - where he has once again scooped the Special Jury Prize - with the non-fiction film Good Valley Stories [+lire aussi :
critique
interview : José Luis Guerín
fiche film], shot on the outskirts of his native Barcelona. We met up with the director.

Cineuropa: How does someone who releases films so infrequently make a living?
José Luis Guerín: My films are so far apart in time that I’ve had to find financial support, and almost always through teaching — which I enjoy more than making adverts. I like seeing how young people think about cinema and dreaming up the films they want to make. I do a lot of mentoring. It’s a way of continuing to think as a filmmaker.

Does that youthful energy also stimulate you?
Both the energy and the astonishment, at times… Because, curiously, there are young people who are terribly old — making films by inertia, repeating formulas — and who haven’t watched cinema, which poses a difficulty for me. Before, you could reel off the classics, and everyone knew who you meant if you spoke of Fritz Lang or Charles Chaplin, but not any more. In fact, one thing I always suggest to students pitching projects is that they put together a brief filmography of titles that have preceded them on the same subject they’re tackling. I find it astonishing that spontaneous curiosity about who filmed something before doesn’t arise. That’s how I start my movies: when I go to a place, I read and research, looking for the cinematic images that came before me.

But in the case of the Vallbona neighbourhood, there was nothing, right?
Exactly! Only Marc Recha used some locations there for his Little Indi [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
fiche film]. That led me to start filming on silent Super 8 because the place was timeless — with unpaved spaces and kids bathing in the streams. These visual motifs took me back to the 1960s or earlier, recalling El Jarama, the novel by Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, when the beach was more the preserve of a particular social class and popular picnics took place by the rivers. That timelessness made me pick up the same camera I began with in the 1970s. I wanted to recover it because it took me back to images I lived through then, and I filmed the present with the past feeling of generating archival images.

And those images form the commission from which this feature then emerged?
Yes – from a commission by MACBA (the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art), which awakened in me the desire to keep exploring that territory, to forge bonds with that place I couldn’t abandon. I fell in love with those people. Because I can only conceive of filming out of affection, which is a limitation as a filmmaker. I believe I can point to monstrosity, but not film monsters. When I film a person, I create a bond.

One assumes that, among all the people from the neighbourhood who appear in the film, you chose the most empathetic…
Certain presences are enjoyable by virtue of their quality as characters, but the concepts they embody were also important — how they describe the human make-up of this place.

That diversity that mirrors the world — a richness that runs counter to certain narratives denying it.
Nationalism projects demons outside oneself. It perceives a purity and authenticity that is supposedly tainted by the presence of others. I can only see it the other way around — there are only advantages, since those foreigners have enriched cities with their presence. I remember, in the 1970s, making pilgrimages to Paris to watch films and being amazed by the sheer human diversity in the Metro. When you came back here, there was only a grey uniformity — people dressed the same… I don’t believe anyone wants to return to that. Blaming society’s ills on the weakest and most unprotected makes my blood boil.

The film is a love letter to these people and this place, where you don’t see mobile phones…
Above all, you don’t see drones — they offer an inhuman point of view, because no one looks the way a drone does. I detest the use of drones; it’s like the overuse of the zoom in the 1960s or the Steadicam creating weightless films, as if floating. People who use drones in cinema should pay higher taxes.