Neus Ballús (Mollet del Vallès, 1980) has always been fascinated by the sea. "I am very aquatic and seeing whales is something that I thought would be very spectacular," she says on the occasion of her new work, the short documentary Blow!, where she explores the unknown and mysterious world of these cetaceans that appear for a few weeks a year in the Catalan coast. The director of Sis dies corrents says that the project, filmed between April and July 2022, was not sought voluntarily.
"By chance" she contacted the Edmaktub association, which studies them in Vilanova i la Geltrú, and they invited her one day to go on a catamaran. "I found this 26-meter animal and I was impressed by all the magic that is generated among scientists when it appears. The animal is detected because there is a 'blow', a kind of burst of air and water that it expels and immediately afterwards it It produces an enormous silence because the whale sinks and you don't know where it will come out," says Ballús in conversation with La Vanguardia at the Barcelona Maritime Museum.
"There is something magical and mystical in this waiting, in this silence," he continues about a situation in which it seems that "you are aware that it is something sacred and I wanted to convey this sensation also in relation to the way in which we are approaching the environment." and other living beings. If it generates this fascination and respect in me it is because I consider them to be very intelligent beings. We normally say 'you are an animal' as if to say that you are a brute and it is precisely the opposite. That is why it is a lesson in humility to see animals that are so large that they do not generate any type of negative impact on their environment and I think we have a lot to learn from them."
The whales come to the Catalan coast, especially to Palamós and Vilanova i la Geltrú, the most historically active fishing ports in Catalonia, for approximately three months, all spring, but it depends a lot on the oceanographic conditions and also on the rainfall. "Very few have appeared this year, so we wouldn't have been able to shoot the film."
Blow! It is above all an immersive work with many underwater scenes that focuses especially on the work of Mar, a young volunteer from the association who dreams of being able to record the sound of cetaceans, a quite complex task. "I was trying to imagine the whale's perspective so that we could put ourselves in its shoes," says Ballús, who wanted to reflect aspects such as "plastics and noise pollution, since it has been proven that cetaceans do not hear each other because we make a lot of noise. "Some studies show that whales are starting to sing louder to be able to communicate with each other. We are having a negative impact and we are not aware of it."
The Catalan director assures that the first cause of death of whales is collisions with merchant ships, which carry enormous speeds to which the whales have not had time to adapt. "Between the noise pollution and the confusion, the animals end up under the boats and sink. We don't know how many whale skeletons there must be down there!" she laments. "They are ancestral animals and you think with what right we are occupying their environment. The sea is their home, not ours. We are a plague, humanity, and we have a lot to learn because we have considered them inferior beings and it is time to look at other forms of intelligence, of life, of nature. They are much more strategic than us. If it were up to them, their lives would be assured. We are the ones who are not intelligent," he admits with resignation.
Ballús confesses that he gets very seasick on a boat and it was complicated for a filming that had a team of five people. "I had to do physical and nutritional training to get used to it and in the end I was amazed because on the last day I ended up running on the catamaran," he explains with a laugh. The most important thing was "not to intervene in the scientists' work. When a whale appears, they have a job to do and we couldn't bother them with our presence. It was something difficult and at the same time beautiful because it is part of this idea of respect, of do what I can, what they allow me and where I can go.
The author of The Plague wanted to condense the story in short film format "almost as an ecological issue because we do not need more audiovisual content. We are living in a moment of so many minutes and hours that they want us to consume just for the sake of consuming that it seemed to me very clean to say that I need to explain this story in just fourteen minutes. And it's something that made me think: if all filmmakers filmed only what we felt needed to be filmed at the moment, maybe we would do a good cleanup."
Blow! It will have its world premiere this Saturday, November 11 at the Amsterdam International Documentary Festival (IDFA) and will then pass through Zinebi, in Bilbao, and the Gijón Festival. Ballús's next project will be a "more fictional" feature film that she is writing and that is somehow related to Blow! "in the sense that I am very interested in the whole issue of animal intelligence that we carry, everything that does not come from rational and logical intelligence and I also reflect a little as a result of the experience of motherhood," he concludes.
