Jana Montllor is not sure that the first memory she has of her father – “we pretended that I served him a coffee that I had made with water and sand after a few days of absence for a filming or a concert” – is true. The actor, musician and poet, Ovidi Montllor, died when she was barely 15 years old and, now, the director and screenwriter tries to give “a new story to his memory” and approach her father in a “more honest and calm” way. with a documentary film written in first person. To do this, she has started a crowdfunding process that allows her to raise the 50,000 euros necessary to close the financing stage of the project.
Five years ago, Jana decided together with five colleagues to set up a film cooperative – La Selva – for film production and training. The intention, she explains to La Vanguardia, was “to create a cinema space with a horizontal logic that would accommodate diverse perspectives, a complicated formula in this sector,” she acknowledges.
From the beginning, the proposal arose to make a film about Ovidi. “When we started I had the idea of making a documentary talking to the people who knew him best. I ignored my point of view as a daughter. In this process we realized that it was very difficult for me to face the fact that what little I remembered of him I had experienced from the fragility of childhood.”
Jana is honest on the other end of the phone. It is the first time that she has not prepared for an interview by reading things that others have written about her father. In the conversation with this newspaper she emphasizes that she had dedicated herself to investigating the professional life of her father "so as not to enter that intimate space and assume that fragility."
That is why they decided to change the look of the initial project. Thus, the film is based on “the small and fragmented memories” that Jana has of her father. “For many years I have felt that my memories were quite insignificant, even, at times, uncertain, compared to the shared public memory” of a figure of such public and artistic relevance as the multifaceted Ovidi Montllor. Thus, the film aims to be an exploration of how memory works and the strange journeys of grief and loss.
Jana explains that she tries, from her memories, to get closer to her father to understand him and know him better, because she regrets not having shared with him the adulthood that would have led her to know deeper things, such as what made him happy. To achieve this, she revisits the public and personal archive and turns to some figures, such as the guitarist Toti Soler or the painter Antoni Miró, who shared so much with Ovidi.
To start filming, La Selva needs a budget of 50,000 euros, which it hopes to raise with a micro-financing campaign. The producer explains that a professional team made up of 10 Catalan women or residents of Catalonia will participate in the filming of the film with the idea of advancing equality in a “very masculinized sector.”
Furthermore, the intention is also, in parallel to the film, to collect the memory of more anonymous people who have memories of Ovidi, since they consider it important, after the artist lost his voice in the political space, to build a new collective memory.
