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Spain

Helena de Llanos • Director of Journey to Somewhere

“It’s very inspiring to run into special people”

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- We chatted about the documentary that pays tribute to the free-spirited atmosphere created by her grandfather, Fernando Fernán Gómez, and his partner, Emma Cohen, in a detached house north of Madrid

Helena de Llanos  • Director of Journey to Somewhere

Journey to Somewhere [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Helena de Llanos
film profile
]
, a film written and directed by, and starring, Helena de Llanos, was premiered at the most recent Seminci and has taken part in festivals of the likes of Abycine, among others. On 11 February, it gets a release in theatres, and in it, de Llanos uses an affectionate and original style to recall her late grandfather, the unforgettable actor, author and director Fernando Fernán Gómez, and his life partner during his final few years: peerless actress and author Emma Cohen, who passed away in 2016.

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Cineuropa: Your feature is surprising because of the risks it takes and how it experiments with the narrative – which is definitely a welcome move
Helena de Llanos:
Well, I don’t know if it’s always welcome, but I’m happy that you appreciate it, because that’s the aim: that mixture of discourses, of ways to tell the story. For me, it was important to steer clear of the regular/conventional biopic, and rather tell the story of these two people whose lives consisted of imagining, creating and inventing. That’s why it seemed to me that the driving force behind the film lay more in adopting their methods, rather than in making a more expository or traditional documentary.

If Fernando and Emma could see it, do you think they would like it?
I don’t know; Fernando was so unpredictable that I have no idea what he would say, but I’d love to find out. I think I only really know what Emma’s reaction would be: she would be quite satisfied, as she was present during the initial stage of work on the film, six years ago, as I began both the research and the screenwriting while she was still alive. She gave me guidance and advice, and offered her opinion. There’s a lot of her creative universe to be found in the narrative form of Journey to Somewhere.

The film depicts a great love story and cements that woman’s place by the side of a brilliant man: she was very creative, courageous and modern.
Emma was very important to me: she was my teacher during the last ten years of her life, after Fernando had passed away. That’s very valuable: discovering that person, not so much to position her in a certain place – because I didn’t need her to be under discussion, and it’s not a restitution, exactly – but rather because I believe that she has a great deal to regale us with and to contribute with her novels and short films. Emma had a very personal way of telling her stories, based on surrealism. There’s also her female perspective on the conflicts, and that adds a lot: she and Fernando represented two powerful worlds, with their own separate universes, even though they worked together quite a lot.

I met Emma when she used to analyse scripts for the Spanish Cinema Purchasing department at Canal+ Spain, in the early 2000s, and she was certainly someone special.
Absolutely. It’s lovely to run into that kind of person in your life, as they are very inspirational.

Fernando was slightly eclipsed by his own public persona: in your film, Emma describes him as a sensitive, and very human, person.
That’s what happens with the public façade: it turns you into a kind of myth, and if you don’t scratch any further, you’re left with what’s on the surface. But by simply knowing a little more, you see what each person was like and where they were coming from in their work.

In this house that they shared, there was an atmosphere of freedom, creativity and general enjoyment.
Exactly, and that’s why the film adopts this particular form: it’s not happening in the plane of reality, but rather in the magical one. That house enables you to tell any story you want: parties like the redheads’ one, which appears in the movie, would be happening when you would go and see them, because for them, everything was fun and games, and coming up with stories… That’s the foundation of this film: I read up a lot, but after starting off with real-life material, everything shifted into an almost fictional plane.

Arranging and selecting such an enormous amount of material must have taken you years not to mention then shaping it into a film.
The hardest thing is selecting from among so much material… I constantly had to leave things out, because there’s enough stuff to make a whole series: there are more than 200 of Fernando’s movies alone. In addition, working with this type of collage, where the dreamlike aspects are very prominent, allows you to avoid being so limited by cause and effect. In the movie, there’s a beginning and an end: in that respect, it’s more classical, with a person who arrives in a house and leaves afterwards, but what happens in the meantime can encompass anything, in any way and at any time. I’ve tried to break up space-time: there is no causality between one thing that you see before and after, as it’s all jumbled up. It took many months, but I loved the editing phase because it allowed me to play around with those materials.

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(Translated from Spanish)

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