Neus Ballús (Mollet del Vallès, 1980) has always been fascinated by the sea. "I'm very aquatic, and seeing whales is something I thought would be very spectacular", she says on the occasion of the new work, the short documentary Blow! , in which he explores the unknown and mysterious world of these cetaceans that appear a few weeks a year on the Catalan coast. The director of Sis dies corrents says that she did not voluntarily seek the project, shot between April and July 2022.
She got in touch "by chance" with the Edmaktub association, which studies them in Vilanova i la Geltrú, and they invited her one day to go on a catamaran. “I came across this 26-meter animal and I was impressed by all the magic that is created 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 then there is an enormous silence because the whale sinks and you don't know where it will come out", says Ballús in a conversation with this newspaper 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". "I wanted to convey this feeling also in relation to the way we approach other living beings. If it causes me this fascination and this respect it is because I consider them to be very intelligent beings. We usually say 'you're an animal' to say that you're a beast, and it's just the opposite. That's why it's a lesson in humility to see such large animals that don't cause any kind of negative impact on the environment, and I think we have a lot to learn from them," explains Ballús.
The whales come to the Catalan coast, especially in Palamós and Vilanova i la Geltrú, the historically most active fishing ports in Catalonia, if not for about three months, all spring, but it depends a lot on the oceanographic conditions and also on the rain. "Very few have appeared this year, so we wouldn't have been able to shoot the film."
Blow! above all, it is an immersive work with many underwater scenes that focuses especially on the work of La Mar, a young volunteer from the association who dreams of recording the sound of cetaceans, a rather complex task. "I was trying to imagine the perspective of the whale so that we could put ourselves in its shoes", comments Ballús, who wanted to reflect aspects such as "plastics and noise pollution, since it has been proven that cetaceans do not feel them because we make a lot of noise. Some studies show that whales start singing louder in order to communicate with each other. We impact in a negative way and we are not aware of it".
The Catalan filmmaker assures that the first cause of death for whales is collisions with merchant ships, which go at "enormous speeds" and 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!", he laments. "They are ancestral animals, I stop to think with what right we occupy their environment. The sea is their home, not ours. We are a plague, humanity, and we still have to learn many things, because we have considered them inferior beings and it is time to focus on other forms of intelligence. They are much more strategic than we are. If it were for the whales, his life would be assured. We are the ones who are not smart", he admits with resignation.
Ballús reveals that he gets very seasick and it was complicated for a shoot with a team of five people. "I had to do physical and nutritional training to get used to it and in the end I hallucinated, because on the last day I ended up running on the catamaran", he explains with a laugh. The most important thing was "not to interfere in the work of scientists. When a whale appears, they have a job to do and we couldn't disturb them with our presence. It was something difficult and, at the same time, beautiful, because it's part of this idea of respect, of doing what I can, what I'm allowed to do and where I can get to."
The author of La plaga wanted to condense the story in short film format "almost like an ecological issue because we don't need more audiovisual content. We live in a time of so many minutes and hours that they want us to consume just for the sake of consuming, that I thought it was very neat to say 'I need to tell this story in only fourteen minutes'. And it's something that made me think: if all the filmmakers shot only what we feel needs to be shot at that moment, maybe we'd do a good cleanup."
Blow! it will have its world premiere on Saturday at the Amsterdam International Documentary Festival (IDFA), and then it will go through the Zinebi, in Bilbao, and the Gijón festival.
Ballús' next project will be a "more fictional" feature film that he is writing and which is somehow related to Blow! : "I'm very interested in the whole topic of animal intelligence that we carry, and I also reflect a little following the experience of motherhood", she concludes.
