Anna Cornudella (Terrassa, 1991) some time ago read an article about the echidna, a peculiar mammal similar to the porcupine that lives in Australia and that as a result of the fires that the country suffered more than ten years ago began to hibernate and the scientific community he was trying to understand how he could have survived in an uninhabitable environment. “The animal lowered its metabolism, buried itself and survived. It is something that shocked me and made me think about what would happen if, due to climate change, all environments were no longer habitable. The human being is an animal that has always survived because it has been adapting very quickly. But what would happen to it if something like this happened? Would we develop a survival system such as hibernation?” she comments in conversation with La Vanguardia within the framework of the Berlin festival, where today she premieres in the Forum section The human hibernation, her first project as a filmmaker.
He presented the idea to the Art Jove scholarship and was awarded a research scholarship that was linked to Macba. The documentation process was carried out alongside the head of research at the European Space Agency who investigates hibernation to go to Mars. At first he presented a video piece of about 20 minutes filmed in the United States, which was the seed of the film. The NASA workshop group that researches hibernation helped her and invited her to North Carolina.
But Covid arrived and everything came to a standstill, until the borders opened and he was able to do the casting and filming there because of “its incredible and powerful landscapes and the fauna there.” “We made the film with a very small budget and with great willpower on the part of the team, made up of six people,” he says. Cornudella wanted the film’s characters to have a special sensitivity to nature, and she looked for people who live on farms.
In fiction we see how a child comes out of a hole and begins to walk alone in the forest. He looks for Clara. He is cold. There are cows and deer. Later, with the arrival of spring, more people emerge from various holes. They are dressed in blue. They observe, touch and smell each other. A young woman appears distressed and screams. Then we see how the animals enter a house and some people talk about memories of the past.
The director’s camera stops filming the chickens in the sink and captures striking close-ups of cows. “We had a long relationship process with the cows because at first it was difficult to get close to them, but in the end everything was very nice with Valentine, the head of the group of cows.” For Cornudella it was essential to show nature in a “contemplative way and also the life cycles from which we are escaping, winters, springs, summers that are very different and that change the behaviors of all the animals. He wanted to remove the power of control from the humans and that it was subject to all these cycles that mark the rest of the animals”.
At one point, a man carrying a child in his arms says that he has been raised by one mother and three fathers. “My purpose was to break the family structure as we know it. If humans could hibernate, it would be something more similar to what bears do, and it seemed interesting to me to assimilate the hibernation of this hypothetical society that I invented to that of groundhogs. , which are the only animals that hibernate as a family. And when they wake up, there is a dance of family structures and scientists don’t know if it’s because they don’t remember who was who or if it’s a way of changing the structures. I wanted to explore everything. this part,” he adds.
The human hibernation is bathed in an atmosphere with natural light that focuses on the small details that occur in wild nature. “Being able to show the micro and the macro was very important and I wanted to give a voice to all the little things. At the color level we wanted each station to be distinguishable.” The team lived as a family for months sleeping on a farm during a “very hard and tiring” shoot. Three months spread across locations in northern New York, South Dakota, Nashville and then in Ripollès.
After so much work, there is a desire to rest, although he has several projects in mind. “I care a lot about the research and creation process. And being able to shoot at tempos that are not usual in a film,” she says. Being at the Berlinale is for her “a dream because she had not projected that the film would have this dimension. She did not even think that it would be released in a cinema. Everything has been a shock.” The plot of the film has caused such excitement that all the seats are already sold out for this afternoon’s screening at the Zoo Palast.
