Carla Valdés León: "I think all the characters and stories have an undercurrent of tragedy".
By MAYTÉ MADRUGA - december 6th, 2023
RIALTA
Carla Valdés León competes in the fourth edition of the INSTAR Film Festival with her film 'The Pure Ones' (2021), available to Cuban audiences from Monday, December 4 through December 10, through the online platform Festhome. It will also be screened from Tuesday through Thursday at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City, as well as on Thursday 7 at the Maison de l'Amérique Latine in Paris, and next Sunday 10 at the General San Martín Cultural Center in Buenos Aires.
These presentations as part of the film event organized by INSTAR are the reason for this interview. A podcast via WhatsApp, as defined by the filmmaker herself, allowed us to talk about her parents, the archive, cinema as a collective art, and always about Cuba and her memories.
The family archive has become an indispensable tool for filmmaking worldwide. How much did that archive contribute and/or hinder you in this film?
There is something that I am very passionate about family archives: it is the record of you that you didn't make. In other words, these first images where I appear, where my parents appear, give meaning to the film because that's where I come from and my family history, and of course, those are my "pure ones", my parents. And it's a story that didn't begin with this film. I've been listening to these songs at family gatherings since my childhood. I know enough about the USSR to understand that I wasn't born there. So that is like a treasure that one finds, especially when you want to start telling your story. That is, to narrate from the intimate, the family, and the personal.
The archive is a treasure that you find, and if you go searching -depending on the moment and the product you are working on- you will find clues there, encrypted messages, that suddenly will work very well with what you are thinking because, of course, you are the same person, the same river: that's where I come from. And it allows me - and I imagine many filmmakers as well- to look at the record we didn't make from a place where we can understand it differently and create something with it.
But I would like to make it clear that the film archive came much later. The process was a little different from other things I've done. 'Days of December' and the film I finished [recently] are films that I have thought about [previously] -and we have thought about, because in the other one, I worked with Lisandra López Fabé and the team from the very conception. I've always had an idea of what film I'm going to make, and then I shoot it, or I'm shooting it, but I've been creating ideas [before]. In this case, 'The Pure Ones' is an extraordinary thing, because I knew that my parents were going to meet in this house with those friends, that Gilberto, a friend they hadn't seen for thirty years, was coming from Germany. I said: "Well, I'll take my camera, I'll take a tripod, I'll take all the equipment I have and, while I'm at it, I'll take the old photos of my parents, and we'll see what happens.
Who knows what will come out.” I looked for a slide projector. It was a loan from a lady I think from Azerbaijan or something like that, who had gone to live in Cuba during the Soviet Union: she had married a Cuban man and had been working and living in Cuba all her life; she was selling her Russian slide projector and lent it to me when I told her the story: "I'll lend it to you", she said, "and then you bring it back to me". But it was a bit like that: that is, camera, photo, projector; my parents were going to be there, I was going to be there... And I said: "Why not?"
I had always wanted, and I still do, to make my parents' film. To make it out of that story that is like a fairy tale, the romantic story of a Russian film, like a Genesis story. For me, my parents' film is all that: their love story, their friends, the USSR, Russian, the songs, the books; a faraway place, a completely imagined place. I think it was because of that intuition that I took the camera and started filming. I filmed all those days. At first, I was experimenting: I like this shot because the house is nice, we're going to film the tablecloth, and we're going to film them having breakfast and the sea and all that. The thing is that what happens in the film starts to unfold: the reunion. And I'm adding more and more, and I realize that, with what I'm filming, I can begin to tell the story of my parents. The film of my parents. During that week, which is how long the shoot lasted, I would sit down at the end of the day and write down what I was filming, what I felt was happening, or maybe this happened here, or I'd like them to do this tomorrow... And so it started to turn from a more intuitive thing into an "Okay, this is where my parents will sit now" shoot. And by the time it got to slide time, I knew I was shooting for something.
That's also why I chose the slide plan because I just wanted to shoot the images. I wasn't going to film them talking, laughing, or anything like that, just the projected image and put them in front of it. Those were later choices. So, of course, the film is my record of a moment that was very much marked by emotion, intuition, and the desire to tell that story, which later in editing becomes ‘The Pure Ones’.
It was a bit like that, that's why I tell you that the archive came later, in the editing process. We started to assemble the images I had filmed and then, much later, digitalizing the VHS that my grandmother left me and with which I started another process related to the family archive, these things appeared, and we said: "Well, let's use this because it tells me why I am filming my parents in this way, in this place". I think that, in those early archival images, there is a mix. There are early VHS images from the nineties, which are the ones my uncles filmed. When my relatives came from the United States, they filmed this kind of thing with a camera they brought with them. But the final trip, in which we arrive at that house, that record in the archive becomes a record that I do film, but at a much younger age. I was fifteen years old when I got my first video camera. So, the mixture of all those images is what has led me to record these other images now. That is the purpose of that first archive.
As for the slides, I have always been passionate about the photos of my parents, and the young people who are portrayed in those photos; they seem to be from another time and another place because they are in another time and another place, of course, but for me there is a distance between those young people and my parents. And it has to do with that love story, that innocence, with the hope of a better future and beauty. Since I was a child, I looked at these photos all the time. My father used to put them on a projector in the house. So I had them very present, and it seemed beautiful to see them thirty, forty years later. I think the images can tell a story by themselves, and that's a little bit of what we tried to do with the slide montage: a little story of them within that other story, the reunion.
As a filmmaker, you are very interested in working with the archive. If you had to give a justification or an explanation for this, what would it be?
I'm passionate about archives, I don't know, it's a power and a weakness. I've worked with institutional archives: ICAIC archives, Cuban television archives, newspaper archives, the National Library, in short... I have a passion for archives. I really like the building and the space of the archive, the organization, and the dynamics of archival preservation. I think it's beautiful to film it but also painful. The space of the archive has a very intense attraction.
On the other hand, the family archive also appeals to me a lot because of what I was telling you before. You find in it keys to understanding why you make the films you want to make. It works that way for me, I don't know. Right now, I'm in the process of writing the project I'm developing and reviewing some family archive material -which doesn't have much to do with the project-, I found a small scene where I'm filming my parents: suddenly, I understand why I do it. I mean, how in the complete innocence and naivety of being fifteen years old, and with a camera in your hand for the first time, you start filming your parents and, when you see yourself now doing it with more awareness, you understand why you started to, in a certain way. You understand from where you started looking at them, and that is very important. Sometimes, I find those answers in the family archive. It helps me a lot in my work, it helps me a lot to think about things, and I think it has to do, in this case too, with the part of the family archive, the place, and the legitimacy from which I want to speak. I want to talk about certain issues that are a bit complex -or that you feel do not belong to your generation, that it is not your history because you did not live it-, and through the archive, through the family history, you can immerse into it, because we all have a personal history and, from it, I can start talking, for example, about the USSR.
I'm not only interested in telling the story of my family, three fighters from Angola, or my grandparents. That's not exactly what interests me. I am interested in how, from those emotions or family stories, I can understand why we behave the way we behave as Cubans or as Cuban families now. Because I have so many contradictions when it comes to understanding certain things, or not understanding them, or when approaching certain subjects... In general, both Days of December and The Pure Ones, as well as the film I am making now, try to talk a bit about Cuba and be part of a search to understand who I - and my generation - can be within the political and social map of the Cuba we live and will live in, which is full of mined territories and places we don't know how to enter. That interests me a lot and the archive allows me to do it.
It has its nuances. Sometimes, the institutional archive has the image already processed, edited, and an established narrative but if you can leave that little path that has been built for you and start to see only the images or listen only to the audios, you will start finding other clues. And that's what the archive is for me: it's a place where I can find clues to understand.
I am excited about projects like “Lxs archivistas salvajes”. On the other hand, I think it's important that the new president of ICAIC, Alexis Triana, talks about the need to rescue the archive. I’m also afraid of effervescent enthusiasm. It takes a long time to invest and organize an archive. It also requires respect for the people who work there and have done so with limited labor guarantees or security and without the necessary supplies or technologies… And sometimes, what rushing things do is violate those processes a bit. I am very afraid of that. It gives me the shivers because enough has already been lost. Too much has been lost from the physical archives in Cuba, and I really don't want more to be lost. On top of that, there is always concern about the censorship of the archive.
Because we talk about the censorship of finished films, which may or may not be shown at festivals... But with the archive, there is a censorship process that involves whether or not to make available what they want or don't want to be seen by the public. And it also happens that what they don't [want to be seen], tends to go to waste, to rot in an archive, and then it is thrown away. And sometimes censorship is not even ideological. It can be: “We are not interested in discarding this film”. Well, in the discarding of that film, there is a record, a moment, or a process that is and could be very relevant to the film landscape of the country. For the history of the country.
Was the representation and/or recreation of the story by your parents and their group of friends something you worked out with them in the process of preparing the film, or did you let it come out "naturally" in the filming?
The representation of my parents' story came out quite spontaneously, naturally, and intuitively for them and me. The crew of this film consisted of me with a camera and my partner at the time, who did the sound. I mean, very poor sound and camera. The best of what we shot is in the short film, and then in post-production, especially in sound, Glenda [Martínez Cabrera], the sound designer, did wonders so that the film could be heard in the best possible way. But obviously, it was a very homemade shoot, very homevideo, very intuitive at the time, and very much a pact with them.
What has always made me happy, calm, and proud of the work we all did in that film is that there was an unspoken pact from the beginning. In fact, there is the image at the beginning of the film, in which Gilberto turns to me and says: "But they are filming me..." In other words, filming them was never a problem. The camera was there, and they knew I was filming all the time, and there was no fear at all; on the contrary, I felt that they gave themselves to the image. Film me, record this moment, which is important to us. There was a sense of, "This is important to us and worth recording, worth leaving our story for the future." And that's beautiful. That pact with my parents and with my parents' friends is beautiful. Even after the film was finished, some of them saw it at the cinema, others at home, and sometimes the comments were: "We didn't imagine you were going to do something like this". A little bit is always like "I'm looking at myself”, but at the same time, it's like: "It's good that it was made; it's good that this story of us was made". And I find that very nice. I am very happy with that process.
The Pure Ones’ is the first time you have worked with a documentary screenwriter, Lisandra López Fabé. What led you to make this decision? Besides the obvious role of a screenwriter, what did López Fabé bring to the film?
I started working with Lisandra [Liso] when I was editing 'The Pure Ones', but in the process of 'The Belly Button Line', which is already finished. I had started working with Liso as a screenwriter for 'The Belly Button Line', and I told her about 'The Pure Ones’, and she joined a process where there was already an editing cut. I was working with Lilmara Cruz Pavón, whom I also include in this answer because I think this trio -Lilmara, Lisandra, and myself- is very important in the final cut of 'The Pure Ones’.
More than having the scriptwriter, it was having Lisandra as a person. I started talking to her, and we began to share ways of seeing cinema, of seeing stories, of approaching and telling them. With Lisandra, it was spectacular, not only because she is incredibly talented and knows how to weave a story from start to finish: she has craft, but also because she has an incredible sensibility. And what is most important to me: together we have created a strong sisterhood and we see ourselves in each other. She knows how to understand why I did it this way or not, what went wrong or not, and she knows how to help me find the story better. In that sense, it was from that sisterhood that we started to finish editing.
And then, Lilmara... I didn't have a script for 'The Pure Ones'; I filmed it, as I told you, without any previous writing. I started working with Lilmara -with whom I also have a very close friendship and sisterhood, and we understand each other very well-. There were many scenes and I gave her the material and told her: "Tell me what do you find here? What do you see at this moment?". Lilmara also edited a lot on her own because she knows the material and my parents and understands perfectly what is at the core of my motivations. In the same way that Lisandra understood it later. And, of course, when you work with those two people who can love your parents in the same way, love them, care for them; [able] to find the emotion of the film and to understand me: why I was making a film about my parents at that moment and [why] I was filming in that way, it's ideal.
This is our film. Then Glenda, in sound post-production, contributed a lot to the narrative. I had a beautiful team. Also, Claudia Ruiz, who did the color correction and with whom I have a very close relationship. Working with a team I felt I had a bond with was fundamental. I couldn't work any other way; I've tried other things, and they didn't work out.
I don't think there are screenwriters for documentary films and screenwriters for fiction. Yes, Lisandra has done a lot of documentary screenwriting, but she can also write a fiction screenplay, a short story, or a novel. What she has, more than knowing how to write for films is that she knows how to understand them; when she becomes involved, she does it fully, and lets you share everything with her: what worries you, what scares you, what you didn't like, or what you did like, what you liked and you don't know why you liked it... She becomes a friend, a sister, and a companion.
Liso also helped us find the final structure of the film. We had many moments in the previous cut that we rearranged so that the structure of the film would be more directed toward the final emotion of my mother singing. This is a finding that was, to a great extent, thanks to Lisandra because she knows how to find that fiber in films.
Would you consider ‘The Pure Ones’ a contribution to the collective construction of a Cuban memory? Why?
I don't know. I wish it was. I was watching some things recently, thinking a bit about the Cuban filmic memory. Especially because I see very little record of the present. Other times, they filmed "professionally" a lot, all the time, what was happening; now very little is filmed. And that had me thinking a lot.
A few months ago, Jose [Jose Luis Aparicio] and I curated an exhibition of recent and not-so-recent Cuban cinema at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, with films by Nicolás Guillén Landrián and Sara Gómez. And I was thinking about the more contemporary cinema, closer to us, and how it is the emotional record of a generation. It is not going to be the documentary record of what happens in the street and everyday life, as it could have been the case of the ICAIC Latin American News, for example, but it is the emotional record. I think it also has something to do with the genres that are being worked on in cinema, that is, science fiction... Well, humor always... I was thinking a lot about that: the emotional record of a time and a generation.
All these characters and stories have tragedy undertones: they are stories and characters that have been betrayed, mocked, or [have] become disenchanted with their story, with no possibility of redemption. They have been left out of their story and always try to get back on that train, but it's impossible. That's a tragedy thing, but it's in comedy, in science fiction, in the most classic documentary -like 'The Pure Ones' might be-, or in something more experimental. I feel this background in the most recent Cuban cinema, and that's why I was telling you that Cuban film memory is more emotional than a documentary record in situ, direct, of the moment, of the day. I hope that a film like 'The Pure Ones' can be part of that in the future and that someone can read it that way. Not to seek in 'The Pure Ones' what my parents' generation was like in their fifties, but to understand a little of their fears and their role as the generation that was promised the world and more.
Sometimes it hurts me a little to say that about our parents, but it is true: that generation, which studied in the Soviet Union, was educated in the hope of a collective project that promised much more than it fulfilled. It delivered things, but it did not deliver everything, and above all, it left these people stranded at some point, without explanation, when they were starting their careers and their lives, and they had to get back on their feet. They had to put themselves together again amid that destruction, by themselves and alone, without the company of the great protective State, without the company of the great social project. On the contrary, [they did it] by problematizing every day, and now much more deeply, that social project that is no longer what they wished it to be.
But I don't want to see them alone in this sadness. It's not only that they had to rebuild themselves, but that they did it somehow. And my question is how they did it, to do it myself, or to do it differently. There is courage also in our parents' generation; maybe not the courage many would have wished for, but I feel that they have been very courageous, and we have to learn a little from them, too. And understand them in order to judge them better. I always do it from love; I cannot do it any other way.
You can read the original note here