10 years ago, the cinematographer Aitor Echevarría shot a short film where a family faced a difficult situation: the addiction of one of its members. Echevarría continued to mature that story convinced that it could become a feature film which, little by little, he gave shape to.
“I contacted Pep Garrido to write the script and he told me that we had to do it halfway. We got down to work, each one wrote a part and then we exchanged them until we got what we wanted.” What they wanted is Disassembling an Elephant, an exciting story with Emma Suárez, Natalia de Molina, Darío Grandinetti and Alba Guilera as protagonists, which has already begun filming in Barcelona.
The team has been working for days in a spectacular house in the upper area of ??Barcelona where they attend to La Vanguardia during a break in filming. “I play Marga, a successful architect who has just come out of a detoxification cure. Marga is an alcoholic and, now, she is trying to rebuild her identity, her life and her present and to fill a great inner void”, explains Suárez . And he adds that this addiction problem “is the great protagonist of the story, because nobody dares to talk about it and face it.”
Natalia de Molina gives life to Blanca, Marga’s daughter, who “is a contemporary dancer and uses her profession to escape from reality because she has a very close bond with her mother and suffers from her illness as she is codependent and a perfectionist “. “Many times, when you take care of a person, you forget about yourself,” says De Molina, who has learned to dance to fully immerse herself in the role.
Suárez and De Molina have been like two lucky clovers for Echevarría, who is well aware of “how difficult it is to make a first film.” The director had thought of these actresses from the outset: “I made the proposal to them and they said yes right away, which has helped me get the financing.” Thanks to this, Disassembling an Elephant is becoming a reality and Echevarría is convinced that the story will arouse public interest, because “Marga is an alcoholic and that is something very common, one in seven people suffers from an addiction throughout of their life”.
Echevarría considers that another of the hooks of Disassembling an Elephant is its structure, because the film “develops in 21 sequences, which show the situation of the leading family in a period of one year.” “The proposal is for the viewer to fill in the gaps and do their part, with the experiences of their own family, the idea is that the audience inhabits the film, that they can live in it,” says the director, who will now take the team to a lake to shoot the last scenes and that he plans to release the film next year.
