The young director Salka Tiziana has her first feature film played in the Sierra Morena in Andalusia, a film that had its German and international premiere last year at the Max Ophüls Festival in Saarbrücken and at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam and then at the Criticism Week in Berlin. It has now started on the MUBI streaming platform. This film is called “For the Time Being” – in German: “For the time being”. Knut Cordsen spoke to the director about the film.
Knut Cordsen: Your film is set in a Spanish landscape lying there in summer indolence, a parched landscape that you make almost the secret main actor of the film with long, static camera angles – that’s how it seems to me, right?
Salka Tiziana: Yes, you could say that. The starting point for this film was actually this specific place in the Sierra Morena, which is particularly characterized in summer by extreme heat, drought and lack of water – and the associated dangers, such as the increasing frequency of forest fires. I had known this area since my childhood, as my mother comes from there, and therefore had a lot of concrete memories, be it sounds, lighting, colors or textures that can also be captured on film. But when I came back there years later as an adult, I perceived this landscape, despite its remoteness and this seeming “wilderness”, as very domesticated and controlled. And this hierarchical relationship between humans and nature interested me.
You were born in Germany, but grew up in Barcelona and studied film in Hamburg and Buenos Aires. And you tell a very special family story in your film: the story of a German mother, her name is Larissa, who visits her mother-in-law’s abandoned property with her two young sons John and Ole in the car. The children are splashing around in the swimming pool, the mother-in-law waters the plants and the daughter-in-law is obviously quite nervous because the father and husband belonging to them are supposed to come too. But that’s just dragging on, the family is waiting for him for the time being. He’s actually the big absentee in this movie, isn’t he?
Yes, it’s true that waiting for those who are absent plays a big role in the film, in the sense that it opens up this shared space in which the characters find themselves in the first place. So the planned meeting is canceled. So what? You still wait for the plan to come true, you hold on to it, although it may no longer be in prospect. For me, it’s less about the absent person than about this in-between moment itself, i.e. about the women and children from the film who find themselves in it. And the difficulty of finding a way to deal with it. So I believe that this moment of standstill and uncertainty is a very fragile moment, in which, however, perception can also be sharpened and processes of change can slowly be initiated.
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