- For “Les Siffleurs”, Corneliu Porumboiu was inspired by a secret language used in the Canaries.
- A corrupt Romanian cop must master him to help drug traffickers who have trapped him.
- Love and danger go hand in hand in this thriller presented at the Cannes Film Festival last May.
When Corneliu Porumboiu discovered Silbo, a whistled language that is practiced on the island of La Gomera in the Canaries, his blood was only turned! He saw in this tradition, material for a thriller script, that of the Whistlers , presented at the Cannes Film Festival last May.
"It took me almost ten years to find the perfect story," says the director of Policeman, adjective and 12:08 pm east of Bucharest at 20 Minutes: that of a corrupt Romanian policeman (Vlad Ivanov) forced to learn the Silbo to help drug traffickers recover a loot before love comes to complicate everything in the guise of the sumptuous Catrinel Marlon.
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An ancestral language
"The Silbo, is both made to understand each other and not to be understood by others," laughs the filmmaker. This paradox takes on its full flavor when the heroes try to express themselves by escaping from their gangster or police enemies. Created by the Guanches, the first inhabitants of the island of La Gomera, the Silbo (“whistling” in Spanish) was used to be able to speak without moving. Since 1999, the Canary Islands government has introduced it as an official subject in schools.
Hitchcock at the "Whistlers"
In the lush Canary Island, the human drama is played with a great deal of hiss. "This mysterious and bewitching language is a joy to hear because it is so melodious," explains the filmmaker. I find the contrast between her beauty and the sordid actions of gangsters to be fascinating, but it can also be used to express more tender feelings. The influence of Alfred Hitchcock is felt throughout a story in which femme fatale and crooked crooks make the hero go wild as he becomes an ace in Silbo.
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Start talking Silbo with LES SIFFLEURS, on January 8 at the cinema.
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Learn the Silbo
The actors in the film had to master the Silbo before filming. “It was not obvious, insists Corneliu Porumboiu, and we had a technical advisor to help them during the shots. This language, nicknamed the "language of birds", is a character in its own right of this catching thriller. "Communication is a very cinematic subject, especially when it applies to genre cinema," acknowledges the filmmaker. The spectator lets himself be guided by the trills and other stridulations of the characters according to a clever scenario.
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