If in 2017 Carla Simón collected the award for best debut feature and the Grand Jury Prize for Summer 1993 in the Generation Kplus section, this year another Catalan named Carla and surname Subirana is participating in Generation 14plus with her first fiction feature film . Sica is a coming-of-age starring a 14-year-old teenager obsessed with the sea returning her father’s body to land, a patron who disappeared in a shipwreck surrounded by mystery, who at the same time reflects on life, death and climate change. Its theatrical release is scheduled for May 19.
The starting point of the story was born in 2016, while Subirana (Barcelona, ??1972), seasoned in documentary, was walking with her partner along the Costa da Morte (A Coruña), one of the most dangerous coastlines in the world, with more than 600 documented shipwrecks. “We were blown away by a very virgin landscape that captivated me and I thought I had to do something,” says the director in conversation with La Vanguardia. Since then, every summer her destiny pointed to that magical place in Galicia. The director remembers when in a bar they met an eleven-year-old boy who proudly showed them a report about his family, dedicated to barnacles, and that he wanted to continue the tradition. “His eyes shone when he spoke. The sea has something that generates an adrenaline rush and it was something that interested me.”
Throughout his trips to the area, Subirana contacted the O Camiño dos Faros association to document himself and meet barnaclers, shipwreck survivors and local historians. “I wanted to understand that landscape because the landscape and the people are communicating vessels,” she continues. She ended up writing a first version of the script and presented it to the director and documentary film producer Alba Sotorra. None of them had made a fiction film, so they launched into the adventure.
Sica (newcomer Thais García) has a friend, Leda, whose father also died in the shipwreck, but little by little they grow apart “because of adolescence and Leda’s attitude, who goes forward while Sica needs to have answers about what happened to the father.” She also does not communicate with her mother (Núria Prims), who is anxious to collect the widow’s pension and return to Catalonia. The young woman only finds the support of Suso, a storm chaser, a kind of oracle who knows by heart how nature behaves and the havoc it can cause.
“He’s a character that couldn’t exist today because of technology and he’s based on Rubén Vázquez, an amateur meteorologist. But I knew I had to make a timeless film and I was interested in the idea of ??observing nature. Talking to a 90-year-old sailor years that looking at the sky and the sea could draw some conclusions”. And to speak at the same time of that coexistence between existence and death in Costa da Morte, “a place that feeds many families but that can also take life. The barnacles have assumed it,” he points out.
For Subirana, adolescence is an exciting, transformational stage of life and Sica “is a non-conformist character, she searches for the truth and is stubborn. She is dazzled by the figure of the father and my intention was to explain the journey that she makes as a heroine towards the mother, the process of understanding her”. Thus, the director sees a parallel with the plot of her first documentary Nadar (2008), a portrait of the women in her family.
This lack of communication between mother and daughter seems to be further aggravated by the fact that Sica speaks in Galician and the character of Prims, in Catalan. “I was interested in her figure as a foreigner on a narrative level, they call her ‘the Catalan’, and deep down I am also a person from outside. I am a director who shoots in another language and another culture,” insists Subirana, who was always clear about that the film should be shot in Galician and have an acting cast from the area. “We saw more than 600 boys and girls, as well as people linked to the sea, and Thais, Marco (Suso) and María (Leda) appeared in that group. Thais had never acted, and on the third day he had already understood everything. It is very intelligent and professional” comments on the young protagonist of a story whose filming, now a year ago, has been “tough and complex”.
Passionate about nature in that landscape, she wanted to film her moods and felt she had to talk about the climate crisis, a topic that worries her a lot. “Sica is a cry for help in the face of the climate crisis. Harmony can only return in her life after Ofelia, the mother of all storms, arrives.” Participating in Berlin with the film is like a dream for Subirana: “I am 50 years old and for me being here with my first fiction makes me very excited. I see it from a perspective that gives me age. It is like the prize for a whole work,” he says happily. For her next project, she will travel to Pallars, the land of her grandmother, and where she has already filmed Nadar. “I think that filmmakers in some way owe a debt to our territory. It’s important that we move in it,” she concludes.
