A simple tweet can change a life. Director Caye Casas was immersed in melancholy. His film The Dining Table had not found a distributor. “They told me that it was so politically incorrect that it couldn’t be released in theaters,” he recalls.
The Catalan director had already had a lot of problems making the film, “because no one gave me subsidies or aid of any kind.” So “I borrowed the apartment from a friend in Terrassa and we filmed there for ten days.” “The project went ahead thanks to the generosity of the actors, David Pareja, Estefanía de los Santos and Itziar Castro, who unfortunately died during filming, but when it was ready, only the Girona cinemas in Barcelona, ??one theater in Terrassa and two in Madrid “They dared to release it,” he explains to La Vanguardia.
Because of those things in life, it was also screened in a cinema in Los Angeles and the legendary director Mick Garris, known for his adaptations of Stephen King’s novels, went to see it. Garris raved about The Dining Room Table: “It’s the best movie of the genre I’ve seen this year,” he tweeted.
“Garris contacted me to congratulate me and asked me for the link, for King. Six hours later, the great King wrote to me and told me that the film was incredible and he also tweeted: ‘There is a Spanish film, The Dining Table, you have never seen a film as black as this one. It’s horrible and also terribly funny. “Think of the Coen brothers’ darkest dream.”
The tweet has gone viral and Casas has gone from melancholy to living “a fairy tale.” The Nightstand premieres this Friday on Filmin.
A fairy tale that he shares with another Catalan filmmaker, Miguel Faus, who resorted to the sale of NFTs to finance his first film, Calladita. He managed to film it on the Costa Brava with Paula Grimaldo and Ariadna Gil as the protagonists and then it was presented for the Andrews / Bernard awards, awarded by Steven Soderbergh. And won.
The American director fell in love with Faus’s film: “The Servant (Joseph Losey, 1963) is one of my favorite films because it is about the illusion of control and Miguel Faus’s film reminded me of it,” explains Soderbergh in statements to La Vanguard.
In The Servant, Dirk Bogarde was a butler who manipulated his employer. In Calladita, Paula Grimaldo is the service employee of a wealthy family that spends their summers on the Costa Brava and gets tired of the humiliation they receive. Faus reflects a somewhat frivolous wealthy class and although that happens in Catalonia, Soderbergh sees it as something close, because “it is a story that can happen anywhere where money has bought a certain level of comfort, status and power.”
“I didn’t feel far from the film at all even though it was set in Barcelona and its surroundings,” says the American director. “There is money in Barcelona,” concludes the director of such well-known films as Ocean’s Eleven and Traffic.
“Shooting my first film was the dream of my life, and when Soderbergh gave us this award in post-production I felt that the dream had come true, that Calladita was now a real feature film and that I now received the admiration and support of a filmmaker whose career and filmography I deeply admire,” Faus tells La Vanguardia.
Now, Spanish viewers will be able to appreciate Soderbergh’s commitment to Catalan cinema, because Calladita will hit Spanish theaters this Friday.
