Born in Barcelona, Ulises Porra co-directed Silvina Schnicer’s films Tigre (2017) and Carajita (2021). This year, he premiered his first solo film, Under the Same Sun [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Ulises Porra
scheda film], at Toronto, and it has just screened at the 22nd Seville European Film Festival. The filmmaker offers a few insights into the complex making of his co-production between the Dominican Republic and Spain.

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Cineuropa: Your film brings together races, cultures and people from different places.
Ulises Porra: In that respect, I’m being true to my life: I’ve lived in Mexico and, in recent years, in Argentina, where I’ve been working. I’ve returned to Spain, and I’m reconnecting now. I’ve been a bit of an emigrant and an adventurer: I went to try my luck and ended up staying. I was fine there, but making films has become unsustainable, so we decided to leave. Under the Same Sun is my first Spanish film.

The film is a spectacular immersion in the jungle. Was it arduous to pull it off under those geographical and climatic conditions?
It was complicated, to be honest. We shot for five weeks there and for one, months later, in Barcelona. What we filmed in the Dominican Republic was a bit “Herzogian”, with a fairly large crew in an inhospitable place, far from any urban centre. We shot for 12 hours a day, six days a week, with no mobile signal and the trucks frequently getting bogged down in the mud. I’ve always made films that demanded we venture into certain places, which creates an incredible collective challenge that you don’t get in any other job - a communal fever where everyone lives together, celebrating the feature while also sharing the woes… It was very interesting and intense.

That slightly mad spirit is also captured by the camera.
This is one of those films that have the distinct quality of having truly been there, beyond the story it tells. That carries over to the screen, and I’m grateful when I see it up there. It’s a comforting subgenre.

But it’s also a character-driven story, with a leading trio forming a kind of family in the middle of nowhere…
That was the first thing that came to mind when I started writing. The husk of Under the Same Sun is an adventure film, but the seed is the humanity of these characters. It sounds like a joke when you start by saying there's a Spaniard, a Chinese woman and a Haitian person; they have different social statuses, but they meet in an isolated place, stripped of their hierarchies.

Are you drawn to that colonial era, with the Church in the middle and different countries vying to seize the Caribbean?
I lived in Yucatán (Mexico), where the crazy relationship between the European continent and the Americas begins, ushering in modernity. Historian Juan Bosch said it was a kind of tragic laboratory of modern society: the forced encounter of three continents hadn’t happened before and was a prelude to today’s globalised world. I liked the idea of making a period film, but with modern characters, especially Lázaro, the protagonist.

He's a poor man overwhelmed by his imposed legacy…
Today more than ever, the only possible ethic is that of success, and having that validate you as a person. There are a lot of expectations, and therefore, there's a lot of frustration at the same time. Lázaro lives between social/family expectations and who he is deep down.

The female lead is also quite modern, strong-willed and decisive.
I imagined her as a woman with job stability but without social skills: her libido is invested in her work, so men get on her nerves quite a bit. Her journey in the film is about seeing the Other and feeling part of what happens to others.

And the third protagonist relies a lot on his glasses.
Baptiste is a Haitian who belonged to his country’s liberation army, which faced up to the French and won. After that, he deserts and comes across a pair of glasses that change his life, because back then, they were like a miracle. We are all weak; we need something in order to be our best selves.

And why did you name the protagonist Lázaro?
Because Lazarus was one of the first zombies. He carries that social dictate that forces him to keep going. It’s also a name with weight and texture, and I love Happy as Lazzaro [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Alice Rohrwacher
scheda film] by Alice Rohrwacher.