Cinema: “The forgetting that we will be” by Fernando Trueba, love stronger than death
The two main characters of Fernando Trueba's film “Forgetting that we will be” which will be released this Wednesday, June 9 on French screens: Hector Abad Gomez, the era, played by Javier Camara and Hector Abad Faciolince, the son, known as Quinquin, interpreted by the young Nicolas Reyes.
© Nour Films
Text by: Isabelle Le Gonidec
9 mins
“The oblivion that we will be” comes out this Wednesday, June 9 on screens in France, and in a few days in Colombia.
The film by Spanish director Fernando Trueba is adapted from the eponymous text by Colombian novelist Hector Abad Faciolince.
The poignant tribute of a son to his father, a painful exercise in memory and, in the end, in reparation, in which the director has inscribed his steps.
A book then now a film, selected at the Cannes Film Festival last year and awarded in Spain by the Goya for best Latin American film.
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"
We have now become the oblivion that we will be
...
I think with hope of this man Who will not know who I was here below. Under the indifferent blue of the Sky This thought consoles me.
This poem attributed to Jorge Luis Borges, Hector Abad Faciolince found it in his father's pocket after his assassination in Medellin in 1987. Doctor, public health specialist (he was the founder of the National School of public health and the first to vaccinate the population on a large scale against polio which was wreaking havoc), defender of injustice, Hector Abad Gomez, the father, had become embarrassing especially as he got involved in politics, and in Colombia , then and again now, a circle stopper is a target to be taken out.
The novelist Hector Abad Faciolince has never ceased to make the verses of Borges lie and to do justice to his father, not to allow oblivion to swallow up his work and his memory. It took him twenty years to write these memoirs and a lot of tears. "
Hector Abad told me that he cried to write this book, from the first to the last page, and I believe him,
" says the director, Fernando Trueba. Tears to bring out the memories of this dear father. Hector Abad Faciolince appeals to Borges and the great Spanish poet Jorge Manrique and to these
Stances on the death of his father
at the conclusion of his book. "
Remember sleeping soul, wake up and see how life goes and death comes, by surprise
..."
“The oblivion that we will be”, a film by Fernando Trueba with Javier Camara, masterful in the role of Colombian doctor Hector Abad Gomez. JuanHurtado
But before being a story of death, the book and the film are a great love story. “
What touched me was the child's crazy love for his father
, when you ask him how the book moved him.
This is the relationship between these two men in this women's house
- little Hector has five sisters.
It is harmony within this family. There is a mixture of happiness and pain that makes you feel full.
»The child's love for his father and vice versa. "
You love me too much
" the child reproaches his father with a laugh. A "
liberal and tolerant
"
father
whose principle of education is "
so that your child is good, make him happy
";
a teacher who encourages his students to question;
a committed citizen who declares himself "
Christian in religion, Marxist in economics and liberal in politics
".
A masterful role for Javier Camara
The Spanish actor Javier Camara is incredible in the role of this father. He forms (in real life) with mother Cecilia, played by Colombian actress Patricia Tamayo, a solid duo. Javier Camara looks moreover both physically and morally to the Colombian doctor and he imposed himself for the role, as much to the director as to the family. He has the same joie de vivre, the same enthusiasm from morning to night, tells Fernando Trueba, who tells us that after reading Hector Abad's book, he had given it to a certain number of dear people. , including Javier Camara when he was leaving for a few months in Colombia on the set of the series
Narcos
.
Forgetting that we will be, a film by Fernando Trueba, which features a family from Medellin is adapted from the book of memories of the same name by Hector Abad Faciolince, published in 2006. In the photo, the actors Javier Camara and Patricia Tamayo who play the parents and their six children in the film. JuanHurtado
“
Colombia is a complex country that I cannot claim to know,
” admits Fernando Trueba humbly, referring to his numerous stays there for festivals or presentations of his films (such as
Calle 54
and
Chico y Rita
which were great public success), his admiration and friendship for the filmmaker and poet Victor Gaviria and the current unrest. The revolt today, it is due to the fact that "
people cannot take it any longer, they dream of another country
", to turn the page on this violence.
The film was shot in Medellin, the city of Pablo Escobar, often filmed (notably by Victor Gaviria) and almost become an object of cinema, but here the city is more a setting than a character. The slums in the heights of the city with malnourished children allow the doctor to support his demonstration: the living conditions of the inhabitants are unworthy. The neighborhood in which the family of little Quinquín (Hector Abad Jr.) lives is peaceful and bourgeois and the children cycle there in peace. The book is Colombian, the production of the film is Colombian, but this love story is transposable, continues Fernando Trueba. "
Here, the historical context is important insofar as it enriches and particularizes an already particular history, but it could have been during the civil war in Spain or during the occupation in France
.
"
"
Memory is an opaque and broken mirror
"
If the book has a linear chronological unfolding, Fernando Trueba introduces a break in his film. “
Memory is an opaque and broken mirror
”, writes Hector Abad, made “
of timeless shells of memories scattered on a beach of oblivion
”. The dramatic construction of the film is freed from the chronology of the book. It opens in black and white, in Italy where the young Hector studied literature, before switching to the boy's early childhood, in color, in a masterful flashback, a sequence that illustrates the complicity between the father and the son.
The warm colors, with golden and fawn tones, tell the story of the warmth of this loving and bubbling family. When asked why this choice, Fernando Trueba appeals to intuition. "
Before you get into the movie, it exists in your head for months and months, you can't project it, but you see it when you close your eyes." And when I closed my eyes, I saw that some scenes were in color and others in white and black. But instead of doing a rational examination of it, I got carried away by the intuition of what I was feeling, by what I was feeling. There is no conceptual approach: I'm going to film in such a way to have such an effect ...
does not work like that in art, in cinema. Maybe for other trades? When you do cinema, the film must take you away. It is intuition, desire and dreams that lead the dance.
And his intuition suggested that he use these color contrasts to make the viewer aware of the change of time, of atmosphere both in the family (with the death of his sister Marta) and in society. Black and white signifies the end of the golden age of childhood, the loss of innocence, the shift into adulthood of little Hector.
Culture and beauty allow one to escape from the brutality of the world - as the doctor does while listening to music in his office-refuge or watching
Visconti's
film
Death in Venice
. And art allows if not to heal wounds, at least to heal them, writes Hector Abad Faciolince. This film is as much as the book an enterprise of remembrance and repair, concludes Fernando Trueba, who has met the entire family of the murdered doctor. The writer accompanied the gestation of the film and its shooting; Hector Abad's daughter, documentary filmmaker Daniela Abad - who also worked on her grandfather's life in the film
Carta a una sombra
(2015) - was a script writer on the film. "
Finally, with the book and the film, Hector Abad Gomez won the battle and the war, even if he died,
”summarizes Fernando Trueba.
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