Karra Elejalde: "I am very affectionate and a stump and it was a challenge to interpret the cold Alfredo so contrary to me"

It is not easy to find a partner for bridge.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
03 November 2022 Thursday 13:48
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Karra Elejalde: "I am very affectionate and a stump and it was a challenge to interpret the cold Alfredo so contrary to me"

It is not easy to find a partner for bridge. Not everyone has the same level of play and fights between partners are not unusual. For this reason, when Vasil arrived in Valencia, the ladies of the club disputed him. Because Vasil was not only a great player, but he also had a good character and was not disturbed by a bad contract, a fine or even a resignation.

Vasil came from Bulgaria where he was an engineer. When he landed in Spain he looked for a job as a cook, but soon found himself unemployed and later forced to sleep on the street. One of the bridge ladies rescued him and asked a friend of hers, Alfredo, to put him up for a few days. This is how Vasil begins, the debut feature by Avelina Prat, which competed in the official section of the Seminci and which will hit Spanish screens tomorrow.

"The film is based on a story that happened to my father, a bridge friend asked him to put up a Bulgarian who couldn't find a job. He lived in my father's house for several months, but in the end he returned to his country", Prat recounts to whom this starting point has given him material to address issues as varied as immigration, friendship, bureaucracy, bridge or chess.

Because Vasil is also a great chess player and that brings him closer to the cold Alfredo, a retired architect whose only plans are to have lunch on Wednesdays with his daughter and play a (very slow) chess game by traditional mail with players from other cities. Ivan Barnev plays Vasil and Karra Elejalde is Alfredo. The work of the pair of actors was convincing at the Seminci where they were rewarded with the award for best male performance ex aequo.

"I'm very affectionate and hard-headed and it was a challenge to play the cold Alfredo so contrary to me," explains Elejalde. "The character is the antipodes of my way of being, because he is a man of few words, educated in the old way," adds the actor, who confesses that he flees from typecasting and that he chooses "alternately comedy and drama roles such as the father of Eight Basque surnames or the Miguel de Unamuno of While the war lasts".

It wasn't easy for Barnev to portray Vasil either, because "I don't speak a word of Spanish and I had to learn all the lines phonetically." "At first it seemed difficult for me to understand each other with Karra because he doesn't speak English, but we immediately hit it off and thanks to Avelina's help we got on very well," adds the actor, who also acknowledges that "all the Spanish I learned during filming I have forgotten".

Barnev, who is very famous in his country, moves like Elejalde between dramatic and comedic roles and that has worked in Vasil where Prat chooses a pleasant and traditional tone to narrate something as hard as the difficulties of immigrants to adapt, to find work or to get documentation. "I was investigating all the possibilities that someone without resources has to have roles and it is very difficult because something is always missing even for someone like Vasil who comes from a country of the European Union," says the director of the film.

In addition to immigration, friendship, bureaucracy, bridge or chess, the city is also very present in Vasil. Despite the difficulties during filming due to the curfew caused by the coronavirus crisis, Valencia becomes in the film a huge set full of parks, charming streets, trendy restaurants and, above all, that bridge club (there are two left in the city) which also has its leading role.