Jaume Claret Muxart. Photo by Marina Miguel Pavia“I love how a river has the power to resurface different stories”: An interview with Jaume Claret Muxart Susana Bessa January 2026 Interviews Issue 116 The river as a mode of expression and perception has long been a source of inspiration for many filmmakers. From Jean Renoir to Ritwik Ghatak, Christian Petzold to Jia Zhangke, going upstream has meant giving away one’s film to an elemental force, vital and transcending. At times the river serves as a narrative device for tales of self-discovery, at other times to invoke ecological concerns, the passage of time or simply the investigation of memory itself, its ebbs and flows. Estrany Riu (Strange River, 2025), the directorial debut by the young Catalonian filmmaker Jaume Claret Muxart, that has enchanted many in the film festival circuit – the film had its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival in the Orizzonti competition – is a film born out of the embodiment of the shift that happens in adolescence, when one gradually stops belonging to others to firmly secure a place within themselves. In Dídac’s (Jan Monter) world, a 16-year-old boy, and the last summer he’ll spend with his parents and two brothers before arriving at himself, fully and completely, he’s juggling the eternal bond with his mother (Nausicaa Bonnín), her past memories as a girl of that age, and his first experience being swept away by desire after a boy emerges from the river Danube along which they’re travelling by bicycle. Somewhere between the swelling of the water, which mirrors Dídac emotionally (so much remains hidden, but is felt), and the intricate mazes of the architecture the characters find themselves in and must learn to navigate, Estrany Riu is a catalyst for the change that comes with the natural order of things. In the form of an incantatory summoning that gives the film an unfinished quality to it, a solidness is found (in the sense of how mature it is) and two worlds are bridged together. One is ending, as Dídac and his family knows it. The other is just beginning. Following three short films (Ella i Jo [2020], Die Donau [2023], La Nostra Habitació [2025]), where people are trying to communicate and connect to each other, Estrany Riu confirms a new voice in Spanish cinema that appears to be examining the nervous system of relationships as pure, and therefore more easily severed, as those between mothers and their children. In the turmoil between what is autobiographical and what is personal but fictionalised, the writer-filmmaker uses his films to confront his own experiences while they project reality in a way that what the audience is left with is not only a feverish dream, but the pulsating vulnerability of youth. Muxart’s reference to Claire Denis’ vigour and fleshiness as a direct influence on his work feels obvious, especially in this first feature film. The film is an anti-vessel, of sorts. Much like the architectural structures the filmmaker places people in. The artistic nests in Ella i Jo don’t contain people; they build themselves around them and their selfhood. The tiny, renovated flat in La Nostra Habitació serves the people inside them, instead of the opposite. Or the progressive school (Ulm School of Design) visited in Estrany Riu is designed with a purpose in mind: to fit into other people’s lives, at last. All Muxart’s work roams freely inside its semiotics, promptly responding to stimulus, and remaining reactive to matter throughout. Moreover, this is the work of someone who’s not concerned with the clichés of otherness, of self-identification through other people’s mechanisms; label segregation. People don’t come of age. They grow, a word he kept going back to in our friendly, long talk. And it’s not about telling a story but rather building one (exactly like one would do a building), from the bottom up. That said, he’s not just striving for his cinema to be a conscious one. He doesn’t hide the fact that its formalism makes up a chain reaction, with the four films actively conversing back and forth, all a part of the same organism that sustains them. A good example of this is seen in how Die Donau (“The Danube never disappears. It never leaves. It runs faithfully. It is there.”) speaks directly to the film that follows it, Estrany Riu (“This is a river of the Danube? Or is it a part of the Danube that leaves? But then all these rivers keep the Danube’s name, they don’t keep their own. Is it because it is the largest river?”). When exploring Estrany Riu’s emotional trail, I discovered Argentinian filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler’s most recent film, Las Corrientes (2025). They make the most beautiful pairing. Water brings them together along with main characters that are awaken by an undeniable energy, forcing them to design their own paths forward and out of that adrift state, of which they are naturally afraid of. But more so than that, these two films are hungry for looking into the way people construct their sense of self. What do others impart and we soak up and make our own. And how and what our projections induce. Looking back at Estrany Riu is to know how silently it lingers, not unlike the deepest, darkest muddiest of waters. As frightening as it is fascinating. And where nothing has a definite beginning or ending. Jaume spoke with Senses of Cinema following the film’s premiere at San Sebastián Film Festival (Donostia Zinemaldia) about all of this and more. The interview has been slightly edited for brevity and clarity. – S.B. *** I was watching all your films in the last couple of days and I feel like your gaze is very romantic because your characters are not afraid. This happens in every film. They’re not afraid to look the camera in the eye. But it’s not to see what’s on the other side. It’s them allowing the camera to peer at them, read their gaze. And not in a voyeuristic way. So I was wondering, and I think this ought to be a good place to start, if that’s what filmmaking feels to you: having a love affair with a subject that you’re setting the lens on. It’s really nice that you saw that, because it’s not a common question, and I feel that it’s been something conscious ever since my first short film. In Ella i Jo, the old woman (the mother of the mother) is my actual mother. And when that look at the camera came to be during the shooting of the film, it had very little to do with me. The DOP, who’s also a filmmaker, Marina Palacio, was the one who pondered ‘what if she looked right at the camera?’ We had not prepared what ended up being on film. When she did it, we were awestruck. And what’s so beautiful in those instances, and especially while working in 16mm, is that there aren’t a lot of monitors around, so I mainly watch what’s happening through the camera’s viewfinder. I remember seeing my mother looking at the camera, therefore looking at me, and it shocked me. It soon became the film’s central image when we started editing. Die Donau Then when I was doing Die Donau, I had that shot in mind. And I love when the films are able to dialogue, when there are elements that allow them to speak to each other. For me, it’s more interesting when it all builds up into a career, a group of films rather than to think about them individually. In a way, I’m always trying to create those connections between them. At that time, I was interested in the telling of a tale, seeing someone do it, so that the audience can imagine it and project those images. It’s almost a film within a film. She’s telling a story in front of the camera to the audience. At the same time, it is all related to the relationship I have with the actors. There is something I first heard from Claire Denis…she said she had to love and desire the actors in order to shoot them. And I always do. I nurture the desire to shoot them. And I really want to be in the middle of this intimacy created between the camera and the actor. A repeating canon. This is also related to how Oriol Campi, the sound designer of all my films, thinks about how to capture the act of the breathing of the person in front of the camera. Sometimes you can hear the person’s breath, which opens a door into the interior of the person. In Estrany Riu, the tone of the film is meant to be the tone of adolescence, the tone of someone you’re inside of. So, looking at the camera actually can have the effect of helping us be that person. Related to this, you keep close to your characters. Like you were saying, we can feel them in their bodies. I’m thinking about that last sequence of Ella i Jo where your mother eats that piece of cake, or the boat sequence in Estrany Riu. In both cases, the camera stays far away enough without intruding on their privacy and disturbing this mystery that people have about themselves. We know and we don’t know at the same time. Is that something you think about? Maybe not so much in a rational way of thinking if I am with them or not, or how much I am with them, but I always think about everything with Pablo, who is the DOP I’ve been working with since Die Donau, especially about the distance of the camera in relation to the actors. For me, one of the great pleasures of making cinema is thinking about the newness of every scene, with each having its own identity. So the distance to the camera is, of course, a concern. It’s an ethical issue in cinema. If you are too close you could endanger the ethical stance. Or, for example, if you are super far, but you are shooting with a telephoto lens, it’s equally not ethical, and it can even be more voyeuristic, you know? So normally the process is trying to find the place to be. About Ella i Jo and that last shot, it was a really long shot – I think it’s close to four minutes – and my mother is not an actress. So I wanted her to be able to feel what’s happening in the scene, that she can be alone at night, listening to the music, eating the cake. She was listening to that Greek song for the first time and she only ate that piece of cake once. We placed the camera behind the wall, where we could see her, but where she could not see us. That way, she could really be alone in that space. It was a one-time sequence. We actually didn’t even have more film! It had to be done. And it had to feel like she was alone. The team was really tense and nervous, but I think the distance between her and the camera does make you feel like you are with her, but at the same time nobody is invading her space. Ella i Jo In Estrany Riu and La Nostra Habitació, the camera is close to the characters but we’re using a wider lens. In the boat scene you were talking about between Alexander and Dídac, the lens is 30mm. The space we had to work with was also really small… Estrany Riu is a film about growing, but it’s also a film about how desire sprouts, about making decisions in life and those colliding in choosing to share one’s intimacy with another person. Pablo and I were constantly asking ourselves ‘what should the right distance be’? For the masturbation scene (with Dídac) in Estrany Riu, we thought of going further away and then shoot him with telephoto, because that way he could have more space, but at the same time we didn’t want there to be a possibility for it to feel voyeuristic. We ended up deciding it was better for him to feel us there with him. It was obviously a delicate scene for Jan to shoot, and our presence helped. In the end, we were just close enough. I hate when the camera starts to touch down on the skin of a character…it happens a lot in contemporary cinema where they want to force you to feel the physicality of the person’s skin, and I just didn’t want that. My guide in regards to all of this is, again, Claire Denis, because she really does find a way to create intimacy in closer shots without ever faltering in her respect for the bodies she’s filming. Estrany Riu I just remembered we did talk about Claire Denis back in Berlin, about Stars at Noon (2022)! Stars at Noon is amazing. It really is. It’s a shame people didn’t seem to respond to it. And you and Claire share a lot. Especially in the sense that you connect colliding worlds. You have been delving into these concepts of family and motherhood by composing portraits of women. They’re painters and radio broadcasters and they’re juggling their careers with family life. In Estrany Riu, the mother’s an actress, and her son is very upset at the beginning of the film because he hates the way he feels their lives are always arranged according to the plays she’s doing. Women are not just carers anymore. Why have you chosen – you’ve been doing this since the beginning – to explore this struggle? Well, there is a lot to unpack here. Firstly, I love to see in cinema, in an abstract physical way and without knowing precisely how to express that otherwise, a woman and a kid boy. I love that image. I think it’s very cinematic. I’m not sure why. I love that relationship also because it gives me a lot of freedom. In Ella i Jo, the kid was not in the screenplay originally. The woman who played the mother in the film is not an actress. She was my literature teacher in high school, and she really wanted to be part of the film, but she told us she couldn’t because of her son. So I thought ‘let’s just incorporate him into the film’. And that relationship arrived by chance. I feel like filmmaking is always about thinking and listening to the people around me, and about embracing what’s naturally happening when you’re making the film so that the connections that grow in it are all organic. And that bond between mother and son began with that film. And it’s a relationship that goes back to the genesis of cinema. And I will never get tired of watching it on screen. Now, I keep thinking ‘how should I portray that relationship’? For me, it’s really important that the mother has a vocation, and what will happen will be based on the transmission of that vocation to her son. In La Nostra Habitació we see that more clearly. She transmits the work to him, and the film is about how he absorbs that. In the film’s last scene, he starts being a part of the radio program while his mother sleeps. La Nostra Habitació When I was writing Estrany Riu, Monika’s vocation didn’t come to me until maybe the 8th version of the screenplay. I wanted her to have some kind of a job, but I wasn’t finding it. I’ve always liked seeing someone recite and repeat a text in a film. That’s when it came to me that she could be an actress which turns it all a bit meta, given the actress playing Dídac’s mother is actually Nausicaa Bonnín, a very well-known actress in Catalonia. So she’s an actress playing an actress trying to find a way of working and living in a family, a group of people among whom she didn’t have time or space to express herself up until now that her boys are older. She can take that time now. I feel like a lot of filmmakers, female friends of mine, are struggling to make their films while also balancing their home life and taking care of their kids, you know? There can be another parent, or a grandparent, but it’s true when people say the kid needs something that only a mother can give. The mother is the mother. It’s an umbilical bond. Yes. And there’s no way anyone can erase that. Hmm now I find that very curious. When I was watching Estrany Riu, I was thinking about how I like the mother’s character more than I do Dídac. Everything about her is intriguing. To me, she’s the protagonist. At one point, she’s telling her son about this love affair of hers one summer holiday long ago that took place where they’re at in the present time. She’s very concerned because, like she tells her son, this will be their last summer together. That’s how she puts it. And doesn’t that always happen between a mother and her child? Eventually the bond doesn’t break exactly, but it changes. And we see that starting to take place in Estrany Riu, with Dídac beginning to run away. He’s starting to belong to himself and to the world, and he’s straying from his family. And you portray this with filmic language very well! Eventually his mother’s love affair mirrors the one Dídac lives that summer. So wouldn’t you say she’s mourning for what’s just about to happen? She’s about to lose him and she’s trying to get the best out of that holiday. Also in her reliving her past, it almost feels like she’s living vicariously through her son. It’s very interesting. For some people, the protagonist is Dídac. For others it’s Monika. And for a select few it’s Biel, the brother. I believe that means I’ve done a good job, because people have strongly related to one of the characters. I think that it is perceivable how Dídac is taking his mother’s story. He listens to it and he appropriates it. Even though the story is not exactly the same. They are different people, after all. What is so interesting about the mother is how her memory of something that happened so long ago has changed the actual event. It’s idyllic in her head now. And it is from that idealism that the story is being told to Dídac. And he’s living in the present. When he’s on that boat, it doesn’t seem idyllic in the same way, you know? His absorption of his mother’s memory changes the minute he’s led himself to experiencing it. Estrany Riu At the same time, the opposite takes place. The mother is seeing her story through the eyes and body of her son. She’s trying to remember that feeling, but it’s his time to do that now. Well, actually I feel that, when she’s coming across that neighbour in Gartenstadt Puchenau, that woman could be another summer love of hers. There is definitely something there. Of course she eventually says ‘I have to go and meet my family’, almost as if she’s saying it could happen but only in another point in time. The adolescent love, the summer love, is something that one can maybe only experience once in life and never again. It’s specific to a certain age. She’s seeing herself through the eyes of her son. This reminds me how my mother has always said she remembers when I stopped being hers and started being myself, and then I was of the world, and that was it. She had to come to terms with the fact that I was my own person. And I see that gesture, that rite of passage in your film. In order to do that, there’s a tension between presence and absence, between what we see, and what they’re feeling and we can’t see. It makes the film toggle between reality and dream. It blurs the boundaries. How do you come across this feverish quality, this tone? The tone is the most important thing in a film. It’s the film’s vertical spine. If I have the tone, I have the film. And then I can work based on that. I can trust in the people I’m working with to have brilliant ideas I don’t have sometimes, because I have the tone. I have an idea about what can be part of the film or what can’t. My responsibility, I feel, is to guide those ideas. And the tone appears via an image, a gesture or a mood. And that mood is normally related to the weather, the season the film happens in. In La Nostra Habitació, it’s meant to be a winter film. Winter is about close spaces, intimacy, these boys. And then that image and idea of someone falling asleep. When we were editing it, we realised that when she’s at the radio station and she’s sleeping, and the screen goes to black before returning to the present time, that the whole entire film may well be a feverish dream of hers, as you said. We’re inside this sleepy state of mind. In Estrany Riu, it’s about late summer and being 16 and desiring something so much that what you project is so strong and powerful that it becomes real. For me, it is a very realistic film because of that. When someone’s talking about magic realism during a Q&A, I always say that’s a totally different thing. Because magic realism is a literary style. The magical part of it is in the content. It’s not only in the form. And what’s happening in Estrany Riu is totally real. When you are that age, and you find someone or imagine you find someone, there’s all that emotional intensity. You feel all those feelings. And for him it’s all as real as it is for someone else. Estrany Riu But what about those zoom shots? Moments where Dídac is almost being haunted. Something is luring him from the woods, or he’s being found in his bedroom while he’s asleep. There’s this other presence. I’m not saying it’s magical, per say, but it’s definitely haunting. What is this then? I don’t know if you remember, but there is a shot of the family cycling, a travelling shot that goes behind a tree. So someone in a Q&A asked ‘who is there looking?’ Because you feel that there is someone there…When we were preparing the film with Pablo, we were thinking about it being Alexander spying on Dídac from different places. And given how Alexander represents the desire, in a way, the zoom shot would be the same as whispering ‘come to me’, trying to get him. The shot in the hotel is the longest zoom shot I’ve ever done. It’s getting closer and closer, and it gets so close to him it’s as if it’s trying to get inside him. And then the other shot, you see that it is his brother’s gaze. What follows changes the perspective of the zoom. Before, you mentioned Monika when she’s in those houses in the Garden City Puchenau, and it’s almost as if she’s not living in the present time anymore. She could be in the past or in the future or somewhere else entirely. It all felt like a maze that opens a door to another dimension. That really stuck with me. After she’s left the neighbour and sees that boy… Yes, exactly there. I like that you’re saying it’s much like going back to the past. It does feel like that because her family’s not around, we’ve left the neighbour and we stay with her point of view. Suddenly, we’re in this labyrinth. And when she comes across that boy… ’who is that boy?’ Yes. Who is he? Things are in movement and they are changing and we stay with one person, instead of the family we were with before. And we wonder who these people are when they’re by themselves. The idyllic houses around them help us reach those thoughts. Architecturally wise, your films nurture these spaces. In Ella i Jo, the older woman is lounging, she has a book on top of her and she’s part of that house. In Estrany Riu, people are just going by these places, exploring, but the father, who’s an architect, claims that houses die if they’re empty and they’re not inhabited by people. What a political and important statement! It is a huge problem where we both live, actually. So many empty houses. It is true. You can think of it that way. I thought extensively about the characters with the film’s co-writer, Meritxell Colell. We even wrote a bible of sorts about each of them so that it would help us understand them. And I remember writing something down about the father… There is a sentence that comes early on in the film about the father’s cooperative projects. An idea is built around this architect who’s concerned with architecture’s social necessities. The politics of architecture are built within that character. My father is an architect, so it’s something very personal to me. Spaces are great sources of inspiration. A space has a sound, and a space has a tone. And they help me imagine how a character will move if and when inside those rooms. I also make small films for architects when I’m not working on my projects. In Ella i Jo, I made that film mainly because the house of the older woman where we shot, my grandparents used to live there. That used to be their house. My grandfather had just died, and given the housing situation in Barcelona they wanted to take my grandmother out of that house and rent it to an expensive “friend”. We were losing the house and we didn’t know how much time we still had with it, so we prepared the short film quickly in an effort to immortalise that space in time. The house is no longer there. Now it’s just another flat. About the daughter’s house in Greece in Ella i Jo, it was my aunt’s workspace. And the paintings we see in the film are my grandmother’s and my aunt’s work. We wanted to shoot in that space because it was where the paintings were done. Also, we had to change the space in order for it to look more like an atelier. It was a place where things were deposited before (trash was building up). After the film, my aunt started to paint again because we had changed the space. We are a great source of influence when we are making films, especially to the people that come across our paths. Right now, they are not living there anymore, they are living in another part of Catalonia, so that place is also no longer in the family. The two houses Ella i Jo was shot in no longer exist as such. In a way, they only exist in the film. Ella i Jo Ella i Jo In Die Donau, I explored the opposite, people with no particular space for themselves. One character is a traveller and his home is far away. And the other character is a young fugitive that has escaped from his home. About La Nostra Habitació, I worked in a radio when I was 18, 19. I really was looking to portray the gestures and the feeling of being in a radio station in that film. So we shot it in the same place I worked at. We changed the lightning and the colours, but besides that we kept it as it is. It’s next to the street which I love. And the house where that family lives is owned by one of my father’s friends, who’s also an architect, and who renovated that small space so it would look like that. At that time, I was especially intrigued by the differences between a workplace and a domestic one. And how one can eventually turn into the other, into a home where people live. I was also writing it during the pandemic, such a specific moment in time where one was indeed the other. Since then, the concept of what a workplace is and what it looks like has changed for good. In Estrany Riu, there are these two amazing buildings. One is Max Bill’s Ulm School of Design, and the other is Roland Rainer’s Gartenstadt Puchenau. I’ve been there and gone there many times. And we went there to stay there and write and take pictures and to start to build the film’s choreography in these spaces. Max Bill’s school is an especially difficult space to shoot, because it has so much presence, so much authorship. I only found it was possible when I thought of doing it via a travelling shot. Almost in a snake-like form. Everything’s connected inside it. The audience is exploring the space through the movement of the actors. In Puchenau, I was getting lost every time I was going there. It really is a labyrinth. So we had to construct a map of the streets where we were going to be at and shoot in order to help us understand the place. In the midst of the landscape and these architectural structures, where does the river come into? What’s your fascination with the Danube about? I was there this summer (in the Austrian part) and I do have to say being under its influence does contaminate the senses. From the age of 10, I did a lot of trips with my family by bicycle and we did them along a lot of different rivers. This film was born out of that, out of something autobiographical. But the film does travel into the personal, leaving the autobiographical behind. When I’m making films, I’m trying to think about what could have happened, but didn’t, opening a door to my imagination. The first river we did when I was very young was the Danube, which, to me, remains the more mysterious one, and maybe, because of that, the most cinematic. I went there with a friend and I found there was a road going along the river that I had no recollection of. Then, I went scouting with my whole family during the summer in the German part of the river, which is where the film was mostly shot (we also did a bit of the Austrian part because Puchenau, the neighbourhood, is in Austria.) Then it was about understanding the river, and the road was so helpful because I could find where the river is growing, where it is changing. The film also took that movement, this feeling of change. Pablo began using long lenses, we don’t see the sky a lot, we’re very close to the characters and the river is smaller. With time, the river grows and we start using open lenses. I’m fascinated by rivers in part due to the scenery, the colour of the water…it’s just so picturesque. Besides, there’s so much symbolism, so much history. I love how a river has the power to resurface different stories. Die Donau is a film about stories around the river, for example. At the end of Estrany Riu, Roc (Dídac and Biel’s brother) is speaking with his parents about the Danube. “This is a river of the Danube? Or is it a part of the Danube that leaves?” It’s all improvised. I confess I wasn’t paying attention to him. I only realised it when I was editing. Oh he’s a genius! And he gives us this gift in the film. Working with young actors we find just how intelligent they really are. Die Donau, the river Die Donau, the river Die Donau, the river Are any of them professional actors? Jan did some theatre in school. In order to find him and the character of Biel, his brother, we saw 850 boys in three months. Jan was the 600th boy we met more or less. It was important that he could act and be that character, but more so than that it was important that he had some mystery about him. That’s also why the river is such a good symbol. The water, as an element, connects people to themselves, to their selfhood and the feeling of better being in their skin. It reminded me so much of Milagros Mumenthaler’s work. I just saw her recent film, Las Corrientes, two days ago. And it’s a perfect pairing with Estrany Riu. You won’t believe this, but I just saw her film too in Greece. It’s a masterpiece. I also love her previous one, La Idea de un Lago (2016). It was a film that changed me, changed my perception of contemporary cinema. And Milagros, well she was one of the tutors of Estrany Riu! No! Really? What a coincidence. Yes. She helped me a lot with the character of Monika. She had a daughter while I was writing the film, so we went really deep into the character of the mother. I felt this strong connection between the two films. In both, the water is a place of belonging which made me think of the experience of being in the womb, and sharing it solely with the mother. The films just come together. I think the universe sometimes does that, when you’re thinking about this one thing and it throws another one at you that gives you answers, and clarifies things. That’s great, but also funny because Las Corrientes (2025) is about a successful fashion designer! But Milagros does delve deep into how to take care of a child, how to be a mother. That scene where she’s trying to leave the house and the daughter is fighting back…I mean, I could feel the character of Monika had gone through that, when her children were younger. That’s probably why they are connected, yes. Water flows in both. Did you think of Estrany Riu more as a coming-of-age or as a love story? Definitely a love story. Once you put the film into the industry, it’s natural the expression ‘coming-of-age’ will be used. It plays with all the topics. But I wanted it to do it differently, you know? I didn’t want it to be about one character, going back to the beginning of our conversation. I didn’t want it to be solely about Dídac. And what you were saying about how the water connects people to themselves, there is something to that in this POV that is ever-changing (sometimes it’s the mother’s sometimes it’s Biel’s) and the way it changes, it takes me back to the movement of the water current, the fluidity. I hope I will be able to continue to be a filmmaker of movement. I was listening to an interview of a filmmaker I love, Ira Sachs, and he was saying he considered himself to be a filmmaker of action. I agree with that immensely. And mirror that myself. I spent a long time thinking about how to portray the waters with Pablo. When we don’t have the river close enough to us, the audience still has to feel it, feel its movement. So the camera is always moving a little bit, and the influence of dance and music is stronger in me than that of literature or theatre. I usually say I’m a frustrated choreographer because I’m not a dancer. Making films is another way to do that. Your gradual evolution as a filmmaker actually confirms that. You went from the static shot, its calmness, to a bigger sense of freedom. La Nostra Habitació is a good case in point. Because while there may be no moving sequences, the camera is moving on the inside. The shot is evolving. Besides, the shot can evolve if it’s long. They give more freedom to the actors. With the travelling shot, which I discovered in Estrany Riu, the camera can pivot around the axis, giving more freedom of movement to the actors and a different way for me to direct them. And then the DOP just has to adapt to that. And we were shooting in 16mm, so we were making two/three takes so every take came out different, and it played like in a play, only happening in the moment. I don’t know if it’s that, but the film feels unpredictable. You don’t know what may or may not happen. It can change at any moment. This is very interesting what you just said. I never thought of that. Maybe this device gives me the opportunity of the improbable. Yes, exactly. I shall have to think more about that, thanks. One last question: in Estrany Riu, there’s an education for love. And a display of queerness in a familiar loving space very rarely seen. I love when Dídac tells his father ‘it’s not about boys, it’s about this one boy’. That to me strikes a chord about what love is about. It’s a definite statement of the film. It was difficult to put that scene in while we were editing, to find the space, but I knew it had to be at the beginning because it has to be the film’s starting point: we are not making a film about someone who’s finding out that he’s gay. Which, to me, is just something really old. And I was bored and angry of seeing films where this aspect is presented as a narrative conflict. This doesn’t have to be a conflict. The conflict has to be about someone making life decisions. To decide to get on the boat, for example. That is a decision. The conflict shouldn’t have to exist in that space of discovering sexuality, your orientation, right? I love that scene because the father is so nice, in the sense that he’s trying. He doesn’t understand a lot. He’s part of an open generation, but not one naturally that way – that inclination is not organic. That scene and dialogue also wasn’t in the screenplay. It showed up in rehearsals. We spent four months doing improvisational exercises to better Jan’s confidence on screen. And so I could understand all his gestures better, too. He kept smiling when he was acting because of shyness. Once we were improvising, and I was the father, he was my son, and we did that right after watching that conservational scene between father and daughter in A Nos Amours (1983), by Maurice Pialat, I translated it, and sent it to Jordi Oriol (the actor who plays his father), who’s a theatre writer and he rewrote the dialogue. It’s an important scene because after that you’re seeing the film differently. You begin to know about the family, about Dídac, and about this education of love, as you said. And it was not in the screenplay, at all. I work so much on them, but I don’t trust them (laughing). Life can more easily step in then. When I see a film that is so incredibly rewritten, there’s no air. It can be too much, too inside those boxes. It stops breathing.
