The Canarian filmmaker Macu Machín was doing a master’s degree in documentary film in Buenos Aires, more than 10,000 kilometers away from her home, when she realized “the super strong bond that Argentines have with their origins.” Her feeling of belonging and her being so far away from her led her to “fabulate and fantasize a lot about a place that for her” had always been magical and that left a deep mark on me. My family’s town in La Palma.” And she decided to make a film with her mother and her two aunts based on the fact that there was a conflict of inheritances over orchards that have no material value, although they do have sentimental value. .
The result is La Hojarasca, a project somewhere between documentary and fiction that premiered in the Forum section of the Berlinale and tells the relationship between these three sisters after years without seeing each other. Carmen lives with her cats in an isolated house and receives a visit from her two sisters, Elsa (Macu’s mother) and Maura, suffering from a degenerative disease, to resolve the distribution of her parents’ inheritance. “They stopped seeing each other for a long time and I wanted to help heal the situation. How naive on my part and what responsibility! I’m not a shaman of anything but I did want to get together and play, because I proposed the film as a game and the origin arises from the fascination I had with the photos in the family album, where I saw a lot of complicity between the sisters, with that contagious laughter,” Machín confesses to La Vanguardia, happy to bring his debut film to Berlin, a city who has come with his parents. The capacity for both showings of the film is already sold out.
All those memories seemed “very powerful” to him and he wanted to transfer them to the big screen, highlighting the meaning of the cycles of life, the power of nature to move forward. “It was my way of telling them how much I loved them through the film. Like a love letter.” Macu already had the project quite advanced and had received the first aid for the subsidy from Canarian television, but the protagonists still did not know that they were going to be. And they accepted the proposal with blushing and stupefaction, without prior contact with the cinema, because until the “exciting” first day of filming “they did not realize the value that their lives had.”
Machín insists that it was all like a game. “He wanted the immersion to be quick and for them to feel comfortable and be able to embrace the team as part of the family. And from the first day they felt like those girls he saw in the photographs,” he says. During the filming, he gave them free rein to do whatever they wanted, although on some occasions she did tell them to say some schematic phrases to understand the basic lines of the plot. “My mother was my ally, my aunt Carmen, who is very outgoing, played another role and my aunt Maura – who has reduced mobility – is a free spirit,” he says, laughing. They rehearsed and filmed at the same time. All the energy that comes out in front of the camera is real. “They really wanted to say things to each other. There was a lot of emotion.”
And from that reunion between almond harvests, supernatural encounters and never-ending discussions, old conflicts emerge that seem to awaken the murmur of the volcano. The film was shot in three phases, with the pandemic in the middle. “When the volcano exploded in September 2021, I was watching TV with my mother and we went there because I felt that the volcano was the continuation of the movie.” The film already talks about the importance of land and nature in history. “There was a storm, a wind, a hurricane… nature was already telling us things, what I couldn’t imagine was that it was going to speak in such a powerful way with the volcano.” That’s why he incorporated it into the dramatic arc of the story.
Machín surrounds La Hojarasca with a Gothic atmosphere, inspired by German romanticism, “with nature as a means of expression that the rational being is not capable of transmitting.” A nature that also draws on the illustrations of Edward Gorey and his laconic humor. And the memories of that almost inaccessible peripheral family town in Punta Gorda with its endless sunsets, photographed taking advantage of the witching hour. The director says that her references “vary from time to time,” although she cites Kelly Reichardt, “who makes very peripheral cinema,” among her favorites. She also likes Alice Rohrwacher, Lucrecia Martel and Roberto Minervini, “who make very hybrid, peripheral cinema, that tells stories that are on the margins.” Machín says that she now lives in the Canary Islands, after a long time away. “I want to make films and tell very personal stories from my land. That’s my universe. There’s everything to tell on the islands.”
