Sometimes when you write you have to put things in order, because in conversations everything comes and goes”. The filmmaker Carla Simón said it yesterday afternoon, at the Biennal de Pensament, and this chronicler thought about how to organize in a few lines the conversation with her counterpart Lucrecia Martel under the baton of Violeta Kovacsics in Plaça Joan Corominas, next to the CCCB.
Stopping to listen, loving the world, they titled it, and we listened. "The writing is all order, and the conversations are more creative," insisted Martel. And of course, hers was a chat like between friends, not because of the disorder, but because of the intimacy acquired despite the more than 900 attendees – counting those who listened standing up, there would be more than a thousand. In fact, they talked so much among themselves that at times they were not heard and the public did not even dare to complain. The film directors spoke of his art, but focusing on the power of sound, which gives life to images that would remain flat and linear without him.
The directors of Alcarràs and La ciénaga recalled that they met at a film workshop in Argentina, in which Simón presented a recorded conversation of his grandmother about whether she wanted to be buried or burned, with music that gave her more life .
But they started talking about the weather. Not the weather, no, rather the one taken for their projects. “One feels that one is in the resistance when asking for more time to cook things slowly,” said Simón, to which Martel agreed to add that rushing is only good for running away, because “the first thing one thinks is usually stupid, more an idea than an idea, and it takes time to think things through.” Taking into account the context of a biennial of thought, it was not a trivial phrase. Ideas that touched, such as "the politically correct morality police" to which Simón alluded, or that in the world of cinema dominated today by platforms, thought from the United States, "Castilian is in the process of losing, and Catalan even more”, recalled Martel. Beans cook everywhere, and he remembered them, of course, also thinking that it was October 12.
"I want to dedicate this song to the peoples of America, who were massacred but were not defeated," presented Julieta Laso, a tango singer with the pianist Elbi Olalla, at the subsequent concert.
A while before, the Russian-language Ukrainian writer Andrei Kurkov had chatted with the Barcelona-based Slovenian translator Simona Škrabec about Another Ukraine. The author of Gray Bees (Alfaguara) gave a brief review of the history of his country and the differences, especially with Russia, between an identity forged by individualism and bathed in a sense of humor and another focused on the community. He also recalled the first days of the war – which he recounts in Diario de una invasion (Debate), in bookstores on November 3 – and how he suddenly forgot that “the night before he was writing a novel”. He has not yet managed to return to fiction, and is now focused on defending a country that he claimed is based on "organized anarchy." Order conversations, organize life.
Catalan version, here
