Marta’s vacation is about to start. The young woman perceives the summer, which she will spend in Gijón at her mother’s house, as a full stop before beginning her new life, because in autumn she plans to return to Madrid to go live with her boyfriend, Leo, and finish her thesis, that it has become stuck, and that it can be the spring to prosper at the university where she works as an assistant professor with a salary that, to be honest, is not very good.
But once in Gijón, Marta’s plans are disrupted. There she meets Pablo, an old boyfriend of hers, and she again establishes a relationship with him. This is how she starts Notes on a summer, which will hit the Spanish billboard on September 1, an intimate and slow film about everyday life that delves into the details of the crisis of the 30s, which can be that of any age.
“With Notes on a Summer I wanted to carry out an investigation into the search for identity, Marta’s, but it could also be mine at a specific moment or that of many thousands of people”, explains the director of the film. , Diego Llorente, in a chat with La Vanguardia on his way through the Atlàntida Film Fest in Palma de Mallorca which was held at the end of last July.
Llorente delves into the idea that “the search for identity always has moments of calm, moments of acceleration, moments of crisis…” And he adds that in the case of the film’s protagonist, “her combined with the fact of living in Madrid, where she tries to find her place by missing some of the things she had in Asturias, to which is added a labor crisis, because she wants to pursue a career as a researcher, but since the salary she receives is insufficient, she has to do other things. works and that forces her to renounce her entity, her most creative part, which is painting”.
For Llorente, the protagonist of Notes on a Summer “suffers the conflict of belonging to two places, which leads her to not be from anywhere, to live in a kind of non-place and to resume her relationship with Pablo, her ex-boyfriend, because Marta looks to many sides very quickly and does not focus and that generates a conflict, a dependency that will condition her”.
Llorente comes “from the world of literature”, which he combines with that of cinema, although he approaches both disciplines in a different way. In the case of cinema, “I do not start from a story that I want to tell, but from a series of images, ideas and phrases that begin to resonate among them and then in my head and grow and join together until a structure appears” .
Later, the casting process is added to this process, of which Llorente is very proud, because “if this film stands out for something, it is from the cast”. It is headed by Katia Borlado, whom Llorente discovered “in a folder belonging to my production manager”. He called her, they had coffee and talked about the movie: “when we separated I felt it was Marta and that’s how it was”. The cast of Notes on a Summer is completed by Álvaro Quintana, who plays Pablo, and Antonio Araque, who is Leo, the boyfriend from Madrid who appears in Gijón in the middle of summer to complicate the life of the disoriented Marta a little more.
