Following on from the female directors of Les amigues de l’Àgata (Laia Alabart, Alba Cros, Laura Rius, Marta Verheyen), Albert Serra and Matías Piñeiro, the D’A 2018 short for this year was directed by Carla Simón (director of Estiu 1993, which closed D’A 2017 and who has won 28 awards since then). Carla Simón has explored family movies to make this mysterious, symbolism-loaded piece with music by Ernest Pipo.
In her own words: “It’s wonderful when life is imprinted in film, offering us the chance to immortalise the gestures that define relationships, the time that’s drawn by a context or the light and colour of a specific atmosphere. Family videos are little treasures of incalculable value that somehow show how the raw materials of cinema can be our own lives.
My first approach to the art of filmmaking was, precisely, making portraits of moments with my family. Although the images I’m presenting here were filmed before I was even born, at my aunt’s first communion. It was a major revelation to uncover them, it’s a chance to observe the memories that you have been told about, where you can live a fragment from the past of the people you love the most and who are no longer here”.
