What life would you like your child to have? Would you like me to go through some of the experiences that you have had or would you prefer that I not repeat them? These are some of the questions that many parents must ask themselves, including the Sabadell filmmaker Fèlix Colomer (Vitals, Shootball), who in his new project that HBO Max premieres today, Les vides del Fèlix, reconstructs different stages of his life to reflect. about which of these experiences would be worth it for his son Riu to live for himself.
The idea for the docuseries, filmed in Catalan and Spanish, arose “after watching the HBO series How to with John Wilson, where a New Yorker goes with his camera through the city analyzing the world around him and noticing banal things to take back. to deeper ground,” says Colomer. “I wanted this independence of going with the camera around the world doing what I want and shooting in one place to end up in another with nothing to see.” And that happens in Les vides del Fèlix where, for example, “in the first chapter we start talking about chess and end up talking about knowing how to win and knowing how to lose.”
The initial idea was to enter the worlds that Colomer has lived (“some very geeky,” he says) and remain as an external observer. "But in the end I didn't know how to stay on the sidelines and I ended up opening up completely in a way that ended up being an absolute therapy where I ended up confessing complexes that I had and talking to my family about taboo topics."
All these reflections are directed towards his son Riu, wondering whether or not he would like him to repeat his experiences. “After having a child, I wanted to show her who her father was and what her experiences have been without giving too many lessons. And in the end, in fact, it was he who gave them to me.”
All the chapters are very different in a docuseries that goes “in crescendo”. After talking about chess, in the second chapter he addresses his seven-year period as a soccer referee, “where I learned that when you have a problem, you have to know how to explain” in reference to the fact that when he left refereeing he resorted to lying.
In the chapter dedicated to porn (he worked in the adult film industry), the filmmaker talks about complexes, like his own, “that of having a small penis”; In the episode Trap, he addresses the stage where he formed a musical group with his partner Valèria to talk “about success and failure”; In Veggie he talks about the contradictions when remembering when he became “a super-activist vegan after having been passionate about eating meat all his life”; and in The Guy with the Banner he talks about reconciliation and healing wounds “with a local police officer who hit me once and we went to trial.”
The most special chapter is the one dedicated to love, where he remembers his intense relationship with his partner: wedding three months after meeting and birth of his son a year later. “Everything was like a romantic movie but then we decided to leave it for routine, something that my father disliked and called us selfish.” A family wound that also ends up being resolved in the docuseries. “The ending is a tribute to my father who has recorded my entire life, just as I am doing with Riu; “We both ended up coming to the conclusion that recording is an act of love,” he concludes.
