KEEPING  A  CULTURE  ALIVE   -   PEOPLE NORTH AND SOUTH OF THE PYRENEES REFLECT UPON THEIR CULTURAL IDENTITY   -   KEEPING  A  CULTURE  ALIVE

Team notes

From the first day Mariel came up with the project,
all the members of the team were gripped with feelings of excitement and fear in equal measure.
One of the main difficulties facing us was that of timing as we did not even know whether the song would win the prize, so making plans was almost impossible. We could not foresee what would happen if we did not win. Therefore, plans for a film of this kind had to be made before even knowing the final result. What if we made a huge effort for nothing? This was a risk we had to take but we all agreed to take the plunge and get on with it.
I will never forget the day when, in one of our working meetings, Mariel told us that “we” had won the prize. Again, we had strongly mixed feelings: we were both happy about winning and terrified at the same time because
it meant the film could be shot!
Another inconvenience we realised, according to Mariel, was the fact that all the filming of the trip to Perpignan had to be done on the day of the prize-giving ceremony itself:
there could be no tricks.

“Filming without cheating is impossible”.
“Cinema is a magic show in itself”. All the arguments against the proposal came from qualified people who knew exactly what they were talking about. However, little by little, we stopped seeing this idea as an impossibility
and ended up taking it on as a challenge.

So we filmed in “real time,”
as Mariel kept reminding us.During the trip, she had to talk, sing a capella, open her heart and empty her soul in front of the camera. And, on top of that, she had to perform in Perpignan once we got there.

But what about the technical facts?
That meant a mobile film crew whilst another fixed crew was getting ready at the venue of the awards. How could we split a director in half?

The script for Mariel’s speech throughout the trip was carefully written, though open to improvisation. The voice in off –the most convenient option for these cases- was cast aside from the very beginning: Mariel’s speech had to be recorded live, “without any tricks”.  Moreover, Mariel managed to avoid repeating scripted sentences. The truth is that the production assistant had drawn up a set of questions that were put to Mariel during the film-making. Mariel went along answering them without the need to follow scripted answers.
The answers had been planned in advance in the form of a guideline that she could check previously but which were not meant to be repeated as a “presenter” would. It was more complex than preparing the answers in detail but it gave the discourse the freshness of a “non-read” speech.
As if it weren’t already complicated enough, the two songs Mariel had to sing a capella throughout the journey were not recorded via playback but sung live so as to stick to the principle of spontaneity that rules the film.

 And the icing on the cake? That the length of the film could not be longer nor shorter than the real time required to travel from Hostalric, the starting point, to Perpignan, the destination. In total, about an hour and twenty minutes. It must be said, though, that this was not a mere whim of Mariel. The truth is that the idea came up in a meeting held in the pre-production stage while the script was being tailored, and we all strongly believe it was the best decision.
As a result, the freshness that pervades the whole film is down to all the very obstacles set and overcome by the team itself. The casting, the location, the research work, the content research, the structure of the discourse, as well as the visual and narrative aesthetics are the result of a huge effort on the part of all the people involved in the project. As such, teamwork has been an essential factor throughout. 

Filming in two different countries
also implies additional problems such as working with multi-language teams, the difficulty in co-ordination and distribution of tasks, incompatible agendas and so forth, comparable perhaps with an obstacle course.
In this case, we are convinced that all the normal obstacles implicit in the shooting of a film plus the extra ones our team set themselves have actually enriched the resulting movie. Thanks to the positive attitude of every single person who took part in the project, the problems that inevitably arose were overcome by developing imaginative and spontaneous strategies, which, in the end, have made a huge difference to the final result.