Tête-à-tête with Lucia Carreras: Journey through the Mexican solitude

  

 “My inspiration is my Fear”, Lucia Carreras transcends to a philosopher and a spiritual celebrationist when she talks about her directorial debut, Nos Vemos, Papa, a movie that challenges the reality principles as well as the conceptual creation of the socio-cultural norms and normality that defines “the normal, rational and correct life” of the people.

“I like to make a movie that a lot of people around the world can identify and communicate with their life, a universal story that includes the life and emotion of every human being irrespective of their cultural and linguistic differences.”  As Lucia Carreras unfolds the hints of her movie, it begins to reflect the life of each daughter and her father all around the world.  She tells the story of a love that transcends death.

Pilar loses her father, from that moment on, time stops. The present begins blending with the past, and the heroine withdraws into a world of her own. Nos Vemos, Papa (see you, Dad) is an intimate story, a contemporary drama that deals with love, loss and solitude; a story in which we travel through the ‘bitter sweetness of death’ and the way we deal with it.

As the time passes, she begins to place the concept of time and space; imagination and reality; normality and abnormality. “I explore the time in the movie. When somebody close to you dies, your times stops and does not move, the clock stops ticking. You’ll be placed in a world where you’ll be able to communicate and see those who are dead.” In the movie, Pilar, unconsciously, relocates herself from the reality of her life. She loves her father and it’s through his life she defines herself. Without his physical existence she is no more in the real world. In the words of the film maker, “Pilar devoted her life to her father. She is wandering in her house as a ghost.”

Though the movie can be read under the light of an Electra complex, Lucia Carreras does not like to call her movie an Electra. “I don’t like to call my movie an Electra complex movie. My movie is about the love (which is not defined under any strict definitions of normality and cultural perspectives) solitude, absence and death that we all go through.

When the film maker talks about the fusion of past and present in her film, she gives the meaning and interpretation of the movie to the audience. “In my movie, Pilar lives in reality and slowly moves to memories; audience live both in reality and memories or imagination at the same time”, she says.

It’s a challenge for the audience to differentiate themselves from the memories and realities of Pilar. “I give the memories of my character to the audience.”