El ser querido, family life and working in culture
In 1975, Agnès Varda shot Daguerréotypes without ever moving further from her home than the electric cable she had run from her meter allowed: eighty metres. She had a small son and did not want to leave him on his own. That domestic limit ended up deciding everything: the neighbourhood she would film, the neighbours who would appear in it, the whole film.
Anyone who works in culture knows this arithmetic well. Premieres fall on Fridays, film festivals land in the school holidays, and shoots last a month at the very least. The question of how a family life holds together in the middle of all that rarely makes it to the table, because it feels like part of the price you already agreed to pay when you decided to make a living from what you love most.
El ser querido, by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, which premiered at Cannes this May, puts that question right in the middle of the frame. An acclaimed director, played by an immense Javier Bardem, casts his daughter (Victoria Luengo) to star in his new film. What on paper is a professional opportunity becomes, inside the shoot, the place where father and daughter finally say to each other what they were never able to say at home.
Sorogoyen pretends to be talking about a film shoot. What he is really doing is an X-ray of what happens when work is also the place where your family is: when directing someone and loving them are the same verb, and nobody knows where one ends and the other begins.
There is a whole lineage of filmmakers who have placed the camera between themselves and their own. Chantal Akerman filmed her mother until the very end in No Home Movie, not as a tribute but because filming her was the way she had of being with her. Lucrecia Martel has spent years shooting families who talk a great deal and say nothing to one another. And here is the question we would like to leave you with: is it an artistic decision, or the perfect excuse to do what you love most without setting family responsibilities aside?
After the screening we are opening a conversation about work-life balance and family relationships for people working in culture, with:
-
Rafa Cortés, film director
-
Antonina Obrador, film director
-
Bàrbara Ferrer, film producer
-
Àngel Pujol, music manager
Four people who work in this sector and know its schedules from the inside. With this fine gathering we have put together, we are not here to solve the world, we are here to talk about it out loud, which is already more than usually happens.
Practical information
Monday 7 September at CineCiutat (C/ Emperadriu Eugènia, 6, Palma).
Tickets here: https://www.reservaentradas.com/entrada/palma-de-mallorca/cineciutat/el-ser-querido/53022/
