Carlos Saura: “It is a lie that there are many films about the Civil War, it is still a taboo subject”

It has done Pedro Almodovar with their Parallel Mothers, where she weaves a story about motherhood and another about Historical memory thanks to a common theme: the truth. The intimate truth and the historical truth as a country. The only way to move on. Has done it now Carlos Saura in an emotional short film with which he has inaugurated the San Sebastián Film Festival. Is named Rosa Rosae, like the declension in Latin that so many children learned and that gives its name to a song by Jose Antonio Labordeta that sets the soundtrack to this work that he dedicates to the children of a war whose consequences he portrayed sharply in his cinema.

A work in which his daughter Anna, producer and promoter of this work, has accompanied him by the hand. She has accompanied him “since she was a child all over the world.” “She has been almost my personal secretary and now she is my agent, and that is wonderful, because I finally have an honest and familiar agent,” Saura tells EL ESPAÑOL with humor. By his side, Anna Saura He explains that it was never a goal to make a short, but that it was “a casual job.” “He works doing short pieces, rehearsals … and he did this exercise, which was originally with his post-war photographs and he taught it to me and it seemed very powerful and very different from other of his pieces,” he adds.

That was the point of origin, but from there everything evolved, until it became what it is now. Rosa Rosae, a short in which he recovers more than thirty images that Saura prints, manipulates and films to create, along with the music of José Antonio Labordeta, whose song gives the short its name: “The song is the beginning of everything, without it nothing I’ve done would have worked. Me I am in love with Labordeta, he is a wonderful singer-songwriter, a great creator and he was a great, extraordinary guy ”.

Labordeta’s song reminds Saura of his childhood as a war boy (he was born in 1932) and the environment and education he experienced afterwards. “I have lived all those things. I am a child of war and all that is in my movies, my experiences as that child are in all of them ”, he explains and makes it clear that the mantra that there are many films on the subject is absolutely false.

“It is a lie that there is a lot of Civil War cinema. I insist on something that I tell many times. I have written a novel called That light, that has been published in many countries and that talks about the Civil War. It is my testimony. I wanted to make a great movie about the War with her, and I have tried it with all the television networks and none of them have been interested. It’s still a taboo subject”He says confidently.

The data support their argument. As this newspaper published, between 2010 and 2018 only 1% of the Spanish titles released dealt with the war conflict. That is why he is surprised that someone says that “we must forget the war.” “And why should we forget it? It must be remembered, but in another way. We are now working on a six-episode series of Lorca, and the war and its antecedents cause Lorca’s death. You cannot talk about him without talking about his terrible death, which is a paradigm of the Civil War ”, he points out.

A short that comes at a perfect time, with the Democratic Memory Law hot and with an eye on all the graves that remain to be opened. A subject that, at Saura’s house, has never been treated in a didactic way or imposed, but that has been penetrating through his cinema and his own experiences: “The truth is that I have not had any education in this regard, always They have let us do what we wanted and they have never told us ‘you must know this’, but by living with him, and through his cinema I have lived that claim ”.

In fact, Saura himself seems to find it difficult to talk about his own experiences in the Civil War at home: “With this work I have gotten much closer to the Civil War, which is a subject we never talk about Except when it comes out in interviews, something that counts as eating cod liver oil, or once I have asked him something, and in this project he has told me more about his experiences and I think that in the face of new generations, mine and the youngest ones, you have to tell it and be aware of what has happened. Knowing where we come from so as not to go back to that ”.

At 89 years old, Carlos Saura does not stop. San Sebastián inaugurates, receives honorary award in Sitges, presents film at Seminci… Where does he get all that energy from? “Not to stop”, confesses his daughter Anna: “he is an active person all day all the time, he does not have time because he is always busy and motivated and for me he is a learning process and an example to follow for all, someone who with 89 He keeps doing things and learning for years ”.

Follow the topics that interest you