Revealed via Beyond The Steppes, which revolved around a forced journey into the Central Asian Steppes, Belgian filmmaker Vanja d’Alcantara subsequently travelled to Japan several years later to make Kokoro [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
scheda film]. She’s returning today with Cap Farewell [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Vanja d’Alcantara
scheda film], a third feature film focusing on a return rather than a departure. She chatted with us about the movie on the occasion of its presentation in the Namur International Francophone Film Festival.

Cineuropa: How did this project come about?
Vanja d’Alcantara: First off, there’s a documentary that I shot in 2001 called La Troisième Vie, which tells the story of a female prisoner in a facility near Madrid. I set off with a camera and was able to interview her, meet her and observe a little of her life in prison. The idea was to meet back up with her a few months after her release, but months later we found out she’d been found dead under a bridge in circumstances that have never really been explained, although there does seem to have been a man involved, and she was using drugs again. I feel like there was a story that no-one got to tell.

Her life was a broken one and it proved impossible to start over. Was Cap Farewell a way to remedy that thwarted hope through fiction?
At this point in time, as a filmmaker, I almost feel a responsibility to make optimistic films, and to also seek out the good in human beings, to show a kind of strength and hope. My heroine, Toni, represents another story written for this woman. I knew she had a little girl, brought up by her grandmother, and that she was really apprehensive about reconnecting with them. She was really feeling the pressure of it, just ahead of her release from prison. That was my starting point, even though the context changed and fiction took over.

What inspired your writing and fuelled your interest in genre film?
There’s a film that had a huge impact on me when I was young, which was The Yards by James Gray, which is also a high-stakes story about someone reintegrating society, where every action taken by the character can be dangerous. I like the tension genre films can bring, with their shades of film noir but also with the real family-drama feel they have. James Gray also says that genre film allows us to tell very personal stories within a framework which makes them more universal and therefore capable of moving audiences. That’s what I tried to do with my film, given that my previous films have been more contemplative. I wanted to focus on a character who was scarred by life, lots of tension, and action!

How would you describe Toni? She went to prison very young and when she’s released she finds the world and the people around her have changed, whereas she herself hasn’t really…
Exactly. Something I liked about Noée Abita was her woman-child side, her adolescent energy. There’s a part of her that’s still a little girl, with her slightly high-pitched voice, and I really liked that ambiguity. It becomes clear that her primary aim is to reconnect with her daughter, to get back to being a mother, but there’s also an irresponsible side to her: she still wants to party, to reconnect with her boyfriend. She takes a huge blow pretty early on after her release, and it’s from that point onwards that she starts to understand her responsibilities and the actions she has to take to achieve her goals.

Toni is also part of a wider family of women.
All three of them had to exist, they had to have their own emotions, their own issues. In this sense, we had to think hard about the grandmother, Betty, during the writing process. We needed to strike a delicate balance. It was important to me to show that motherhood isn’t just one long and tranquil river, that there are twists and turns, scrapes and accidents along the way. Me and my co-writers wanted to distance ourselves from the sterile and slightly clean-cut image mothers can have. I wanted her to have rough edges, and a darker side too.