Fernando Salem: “As a people we have to be able to tell our own stories and have screens to show them”

[Inkriql]

Fernando Salem returns to the big screen after his debut opera How almost everything works, released in 2015. On this occasion, he had the possibility of representing a text by the Argentine writer Romina Paula. Despite not being a work of their own, certain dramatic parallels can be drawn between the two stories: women who are uncomfortable protagonists with their present who are looking for some answers that have been left unfinished in the past.

Death does not exist and neither does love, which opens on January 9, is based on Emilia, a young psychologist who is invited to return to her hometown in Patagonia to spread the ashes of Andrea, her best friend. That trip will mean the reunion with the life he had left, with his friend's family immersed in an agonizing duel and especially with Julian, his first love, who just became a father.

As in the novel, in the film you managed to immerse yourself in the anguish of the protagonist (Antonella Saldicco, who surprises with her first protagonist fiction) when confronting those ghosts of the past that once again feel their own flesh and cast doubt on all what she had built: a professional career, a stable job and a couple of years. On that tour, where she has stopped her life, she will discover how the stories of those characters who knew how to be key in their childhood and adolescence continued but now became somewhat distant and strange. The context of this drama, which allows certain touches of humor, occurs in the harsh winter environment of the Santa Cruz town of November 28. Together with the music of Santiago Motorizado they will give the perfect atmosphere to reflect on the stories and loves that we do not dare to live.

- How does Romina Paula's August novel come to your hands, on which you base your film?

- When I was doing my previous movie How almost all things work, Esteban Garelli, the co-writer, came and told me in the August novel there is a clue to solve a problem we had with the character of Celina the protagonist of the film. I read it, it served us and I loved it. I interrupted the writing of the movie to read August and as soon as I finished the movie, I approached Romina, through her friends and proposed to do something with her novel. She couldn't believe it since the other film had not yet finished. We started to work and the surprising thing was that he told me: "Look Fer me my work with the movie I already did it, now he does what you want". It was very dizzying since I admire Romina very much and believed that she would accompany me in the process. However he told me "it's your movie, so you have complete freedom".

Was there a round trip with her?

- Yes, I proposed the idea of, not to make any voiceover of Emilia (the protagonist) talking to her dead friend, put on the screen the dead friend, but not as a zombie but as a presence. He thought about it for a while and told me that he thought it was fantastic since it was not like the book and because I was putting my own things of magical realism. The truth is that it began to embolden me a little more to make it my own and look for my questions in the novel. It was a pretty angered adaptation because that freedom he gave me ended up somehow directing me.

- What caught you in the novel?

- What Romina has is a rather sordid look of the world, hopeless, but beautiful too. On the other hand, it is a feminine look. For me, it's approaching the female universe, it's like entering the brain and seeing what happens to her, what she thinks. More than anything for someone like me who, being a man, I am far from being able to witness that. The female universe is presented to me as a mystery and it is like a giant and deep Olympic pool, difficult to tackle.

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