Directing
A memory exercise, a crystalized moment in time that captures poetic and existential quotidian gestures. A journey into a world of estrangement in which nothing is what it seems, yet it gives way to the vision of a better future after the storm. A work that begins with a sequence of correspondences in the distance to gradually become an essay that reflects on the perception of time, confinement, the impact of man on nature and the very act of filmmaking.
Bordeaux, France, 1828. Spanish painter Francisco de Goya y Lucientes dies in his French exile on April 16th and is buried in the local cemetery. Nobody, not even his only living son, Javier, claims his body. In 1888, after years of paperwork, the Spanish consul Pereyra finally obtains permission to exhume Goya's remains with the purpose to bury them in Spain. When the crypt is opened, the gravediggers make a discovery as macabre as it is stunning…
Italy, March 1980. César travels to the ruins of Pompeii with the extravagant intention of recording psychophonies, supernatural echoes of the great eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed the city in the 1st century, but he does not succeed. However, on one of the tapes a strange phrase, much more recent, is recorded, words that César has already heard somewhere…
At the end of the 19th century, a musical theater industry emerged in Spain that brought illiterate people into theaters, becoming their preferred form of entertainment: the Género Chico. The success of works like "La verbena de la paloma", "La Gran Vía", "Chateau Margaux", and "Dúo de la Africana", among hundreds of others, made their songs echo in homes, cafés, and streets, first in Madrid and later in all Spanish-speaking cities. Chueca, Chapí, Giménez, Vives, and Caballero were creators of the pop hits of the moment, which crossed the Atlantic and the Pyrenees to be heard all over the world.
