After passing through the Berlin Festival and the BCN Film Festival, it premieres on our screens “Sica”, a film in which the landscape is one more character. We spoke with its director, Carla Subirana, and the co-star, Núria Prims, about the film, the force of nature, the passage of time and mental health.
In the 1990s, Núria Prims went to the concerts in room B at Zeleste – now Razzmatazz – in Barcelona “where the freakiest unknown groups from all over the world played” and there she met musicians, promoters and even journalists. of this post. “I went alone because I wanted to enjoy myself, but I have very good memories of those years”he confesses, although he admits, between laughs, that now he has grown “older” and is going “to sleep soon”. “I do what I can, but I’m not so attentive to meet new groups”, he concludes. Indeed, it has been a long time since she was one of the protagonists of those sounded “History’s part of the Crown” about the youth of the moment. Now she has to play mother roles like the one she plays in “Sica”the first fiction feature film by documentary filmmaker Carla Subirana (“Nadar”, “Volar”), which premieres after having passed through the Berlinale and having closed the BCN Film Festival, the framework of this meeting with Prims and Subirana.
“Sica” is the initiation story of a teenager –the newcomer Thais García– from the Galician Costa Da Morte who waits for the sea to return the body of her father, a fisherman who disappeared in a shipwreck. “The sea excites me and I feel very free in it, but, at the same time, it scares me. Its immensity, not hitting bottom and that what is under its surface is always something unknown causes me some concern. And that is what happened to me with the Costa Da Morte”confesses Subirana about the landscape that dominates the film. “When you walk through it you have the sensation of walking through an inhospitable, unknown planet; that feeling of fragility of the human being in the face of these brutal landscapes”, finish off. In the film, Prims is the mother of the protagonist – the Sica of the title – with whom she has a difficult relationship: “The film is the process of this girl who is losing the skin of childhood. It’s the heroine’s journey [Joseph] Campbell [mitólogo que, en su obra ‘El héroe de las mil caras’, analiza las historias épicas y extrae una estructura básica] pIn order to, in this case, discover that this mythologized father is nothing more than an absence and that the one who is present is her, the mother”discovers Subirana.
The film is dedicated to another mother, nature, which with all its strength, textures and sounds has a preponderant presence in the film. “One of my objectives as a filmmaker, even a challenge that I set myself, was to capture the moods of nature and how the sea can show calm, fury, imbalance…”, recognizes Subirana, who confirms Andrea Arnold as her main reference, especially “Wuthering Heights” since in said tape “There is very little dialogue and much is explained through the landscape, the wind and the colors”. For her part, Núria Prims found an ally in the environment for her interpretation. “When you enter a project in which nature has that force, it is as simple as letting yourself be carried away by that environment. Listen and let it come to you. It makes it easy for you and it’s nice. They are tools that, if you are awake and receptive, make everything go by itself”recognize.
However, in relation to the naturalistic background of the film, according to the documentary origin of the filmmaker, Subirana qualifies that “This realism is the basis of a film that is highly constructed in terms of sound and editing, since you are constantly entering into the subjectivity of the character, their moods, and their fears”. It further specifies that “There are some sounds that are linked to characters and spaces. In the mother’s house, for example, there is always a sound of wood, of a ship that is about to sink, which is how she finds herself. They are very subtle things that it is impossible for the viewer to be aware of, but when repeated, they unconsciously connect with it. EITHER -keep going- when Suso appears, a character who in Campbell’s trip would be the one who helps the heroine on her way, some strange birds sound announcing their arrival”.
The film also takes care of the language of the area. “I had to be faithful to the territory and Galician is spoken there in a very specific way, with a very specific accent, with gheada and lisp. It seemed essential to me to respect these elements”, says the director. Furthermore, in “Sica” Galician and Catalan coexist. “It helped me that the mother was Catalan to build the character. She is the stranger, the one from abroad, the one who will always be ‘the Catalan’, even though she has lived there for twenty years. I wanted to introduce and naturalize this coexistence and the wealth of a country where that can happen. Furthermore, at the plot level, the fact that one speaks to him in Catalan and the other answers in Galician reinforces the distance between them. Only Sica will say a sentence in Catalan and what she says to him and when she says it to him is not by chance ”, Subirana account. For his part, Prims, who has some phrases in Galician, comments that “No matter how few they are, you have a job because you want to say it naturally. When you shoot you are for many things, if the brand is here, if the light is there… If the language is not yours, there is something rigid there that makes you not feel so free”.
Impossible not to ask the actress about Agustí Villaronga, who died in January, a director who revived his career in 2013 with “Uncertain Glory” al “a thousand percent. I had left the profession and returned because he asked me to”, reveals. For her role, she won the Gaudí but, from the Goyas, not even the nomination. “Of course, because of my career, it would have been good for me to be nominated, but then you see that it is not a reference either. How many people have won a Goya and then…? If we never know what is going to happen in life, imagine yourself in such an unstable profession. You have to take advantage of what comes, always be grateful and stay with that “confesses the actress, who is now pending a theater project, to which she recently returned thanks, once again, to Villaronga. “I had left him many years before due to stage fright and in 2021 he gave me a big deal, a Clytemnestra [en “Clitemnestra. La casa dels noms”, de Colm Tóibín], practically a monologue. About her attack of stage fright, she is honest and admits that it still happens to her “sometime on television. You go blank, but not just text but not knowing who is in front of you. When that happened to me in a monologue that I did many years ago, I got worried and wanted to take better care of myself: I fled. Then, over the years, you realize that you don’t have to run away, but that you have to face”. And he adds, by way of vital summary: “And so life goes by, learning”.
