Juanma Bajo Ulloa (Vitoria, 1967), after his last production Gypsy King and author of classics like Airbag, presents Baby, a gothic tale about motherhood, second chances and personal acceptance, about which she spoke today at the Aragonia cinemas in Zaragoza.
-‘Baby ‘is perhaps a return to his origins as a director, to less commercial films. Has it been difficult to raise the project and get it exposed?
-I often say that I have never left my origins, I am simply talking about an inner world that interests me, about obsessions that have to do with the human soul, with the concept of love and the monsters that we create for lack of love. For this I usually use stories, because they go a lot to the essence of the human being, to fears. I make movies when I think I have something interesting to tell. I know that the moment is worse than when I started my career mainly because the public has been reeducated and indoctrinated, reeducated in the sense of thinking and acting and indoctrinated in a way of thinking politically and socially. It is the way that governments and the establishment have to turn people into a meek mass. When a creator has the ability to influence the individual, when he makes him reflect, the system sees him as dangerous. In this scenario it is difficult to make a creatively free film, because there is no space.
-A multi-drug addict woman who sells her daughter and tries to get her back, defines it as a fable, about motherhood?
-Motherhood is perhaps the most obvious, behind it is creation, life. Of how the feminine is what has creative potential, the ability to create. We call nature itself Mother Earth. The film itself is a metaphor about life and death, the figure of the mother, the creator was very important.
-You have opted for a feature film without dialogue, which although it might seem limiting allows you to explore other languages.
-What we do is give prominence to the natural elements of the cinema, the light and darkness, the music, the interpretation, the looks of the actresses, the scenery … Those elements are what the cinema has to narrate, and the dialogue of somehow it perverts all that. When you dispense with the dialogues, you give value to all the elements of the cinema and you get the viewer to give value even to the small sounds. We give you an opportunity that this manipulated and purely consumer cinema has lost, the ability to interpret. Sit down and decide how you interpret what you are seeing, if you make value judgments they are yours. The narration is simple, behind that, what the interested viewer will discover are symbols, the journey from fear to love, due to the difficulties that the protagonist has and the disconnection she has with nature, she connects to it. and he becomes a person capable of loving himself.
– Interspersed images with metaphors, that do not necessarily have a justification or that are not explained, is this way a more emotional and visceral cinema is achieved?
-It arises from somewhere, everything is intimately connected. There were elements of nature, like spiders, which are very important in the film. They represent a phobia. Everything has a reason for being but does not necessarily have to be interpreted with the mind. You are going to receive it and your subconscious is going to interpret it. That is why there are people who tell us that they dream of the movie or that they seem to be watching someone else’s dream. It is fine for the creator to use the brain as a tool, but it must start from emotion and guts. He doesn’t even know why he does things, they come out and he can’t help it.
-You said that when you emerged as an artist with other Basque colleagues, part of your creativity came from the repression that the Basque Country had suffered. Now that you see a repression in the cinema as art, where do you think that new rebellious creativity can go?
– I hope that it rebels and that it is projected, but now I do not see it. In general, I see my colleagues trying to please the system, to do what is going to be good, to be accepted. I don’t see them going on their own and trying to develop their free creativity. Perhaps because the system has never been as aggressive as before. Now, the system has passed that power to the people, it is the citizen who points the finger at you. Debate has not been cultivated, but complain and give your opinion.
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