What do we do in the face of the inevitable? Well, we filmed” Carme Elias is an actress and Claudia Pinto is a film director. They have been great friends since they filmed The Longest Distance in 2013. They worked together again in The Consequences (2021). That's when they realized something was wrong.
“Carme was perfect in her role. She had captured the character emotionally, but sometimes she would say things that didn't make sense or she would forget the phrases,” Pinto remembers. “She studied, rehearsed, prepared me and suddenly, she stopped me and I couldn't continue,” adds Elias.
The actress had visited several doctors who did not know what to tell her, but after that filming the final diagnosis came: Alzheimer's. It was “distressing.” There was only one way to alleviate the pain: rolling.
So Pinto got behind the camera and Elias took, as so often before, the role of protagonist to film “secretly” While you are. “It was the way to safeguard memories, to leave a trace of myself for the family. I wanted to have the movie at home and be able to watch it whenever I wanted. That is why it is an unexpected, spontaneous film that arises from the real need of a person who is leaving and does not want to leave.”
For four years, Pinto's camera has followed Elias everywhere. To the theater of Juan Carlos Corazza, teacher of actors, that he sits with her to relive the great texts that he recited, the great characters that he embodied. To the authors who made it shine: Chekhov, Calderón, Euripides. Tennessee Williams, Lorca, Molière...
The filmmaker has also filmed Elias during his vacations, at home on a daily basis or while he was at the Malaga Festival... to portray “his sense of humor, his strength, his courage, his bravery,” says the director
A courage that led Elias to make his illness public and write a book about how he lives with Alzheimer's, When I'm No Longer Me (Planet/Column). It was the right decision, because he has helped many people talk “about an illness that not much is said about, that is lived behind closed doors, that is locked up at home.”
Now, Carme and Claudia have also decided to make public their secret film, this While You Are, which on Sunday won the Gaudí for best documentary, which is nominated for the Goya and which opens in Spanish theaters tomorrow. A film that touches the heart: “during a preview in Madrid, one of the viewers who cares for her husband with Alzheimer's, was moved because thanks to the film she had better understood what her husband was feeling.”
Coinciding with that Malaga Festival that Pinto's camera recorded, the Euthanasia Law was approved. For Elias it was one of the crucial moments since he had the final diagnosis. “I have signed my last will to have a dignified death. It is written, delivered. It is already done and I hope that my family will be faithful to my wish,” says the actress.
And he adds that the horizon of the end was what “distressed him the most, it obsessed me, I couldn't think about anything else, but as soon as I signed the papers and handed them in, I was calm.”
That moment may still be a long time away, because Elias is beautiful, charming, in a good mood. “This is going slower than she imagined,” she says during her relaxed chat with La Vanguardia. “Now there are two of us, Alzheimer's and me, sometimes one rules, sometimes the other,” she concludes.
