Focus on El Agua, noticed at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes in 2022, and to discover at the cinema this Wednesday. Between the supernatural and popular beliefs, a bewitching first feature film.
It’s summer in a small village in southeastern Spain. A storm threatens to cause the river that runs through it to overflow again. An old popular belief assures that certain women are predestined to disappear with each new flood, because they have “the water in them”. A group of young people try to survive the weariness of summer, they smoke, dance, desire each other. In this electric atmosphere, Ana and José live a love story, until the storm breaks…
El Agua, carried by the incandescent Luna Pamies, whose first role in the cinema, gave us to see a story of popular belief, of which we cannot say whether it is pure fiction or inspired by real events. The film seduces in its way of articulating a documentary dimension with fantasy.
Director Elena Lopez Riera says she loves everything “to the supernatural and beliefs, such as the evil eye, talking with the dead“*.”How to introduce all these things that belong to other forces from elsewhere in the concrete of life? All that is mysticism and religion interests me a lot, as a practice, belief or way of seeing the world“.
There is this absolute need for magic and the supernatural.
The director summoned the memory of old books and films: “It started in literature and then with the fantastic RKO films of the 1940s by Jacques Tourneur, such as La Féline (Cat People, 1942) which plays on people’s perception and not on an external reality. I built Ana’s story that way. We will never know if this story is true, but as soon as it becomes a reality for her because she begins to believe it, it changes her perception, her vision, and this supernatural becomes real. And then, there is this absolute need for magic and the supernatural specific to this very hard region to live in, to overcome this and invent a poetry, an elsewhere, life that cannot be reduced to its own reality..”
“It’s a fiction that I grew up with. I believed my grandmother because she told me“explained the director on the stage of the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes last May. Filmmaker Elena Lopez Riera explains that she has “grew up with these mythologies, with this kind of love-hate water and all that goes with it“.
“I was lucky to be raised by women like that and women I met “, she adds.”The legend exists and it has been modified somewhat. Successive floods, in addition to the images of dead animals and the stories of missing people, I especially remember the stories of the old women of the village who spoke of women swallowed by the river. According to local beliefs, they would be condemned to disappear with each new flood. Like a curse that pursues them. “
The form of the film is interesting on several counts, in particular for its insertions of sequences face-camera with women evoking this popular belief. “For the women in the film who testify in front of the camera and talk about the legend, it was first necessary to help them overcome their fear, because I did not want them to read or learn a text because nothing was written: there was a blockage, they felt that they did not know how to speak in public, did not feel legitimate“, she develops in the press kit for the film. “I wanted them to tell the legend as they wanted. The word makes them grow and transforms them. We had a lot of doubts and discussions on this subject because there was the risk of interrupting a fictional story. It’s very beautiful to receive this liberated speech which reinvents itself and reappropriates a story. My desire to make films really comes from there. I grew up with women who loved to tell stories and cherished the spoken word“.
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Moreover, the love scenes between the characters of the heroine Ana and José are very beautiful. El Agua is a first feature film to be discovered at the cinema.
* Quotes taken from the film’s press kit