‘While You Are’ begins with a moment from the filming of ‘Consequences’ (2021), Venezuelan director Claudia Pinto’s second film with Carme Elias.. In this sequence, Elias cannot continue acting out a scene because he does not remember the dialogue. Actors have the resources to avoid being idle in situations with these characteristics, evident in many films and theatrical performances.
We can say that her pregnancy started ‘while you were there’.This unconventional documentary shows Barcelona’s gorgeous actress He faced Alzheimer’s disease, which he named AlWith the person who is now in a different relationship: “We already know each other, we are already friends, I know how you act and I just need to be careful. Al is lighter, it’s not that bad. “If you say Alzheimer’s, you enter a different world.” Acceptance.
When did you decide to make this kind of document and emotional chronology of the process in which the protagonist of ‘Camino’, which will take five years to shoot, begins to get carried away? “Carmen was starting to get suspicious, but the doctors couldn’t see anything,” the director explains to us. “When we shot ‘The Consequences,’ Carmen was very clear about the character and where she should interpret it on an emotional level, but the text, the words, came out in a very absurd way and she didn’t realize it. . “When an actor makes a mistake or has stage fright, he acts differently.”
Faced with this then-inexplicable situation, Elias told Pinto to replace him with another player. “Of course I told him no, I trusted him and didn’t want to be a disappointment in his relationship with the business.” The movie ended and nothing special was observed, but the diagnosis came soon after.
leave a mark
“We had no intention of filming anything. I took the train to Valencia to explain the diagnosis, and that’s when Claudia asked me if I wanted us to leave a trace of all this, and I said yes, it’s a family thing,” recalls Elias. Pinto adds that it was “leaving a trace.” Because you don’t know what the disease is like, how much time you have, what it will steal from you tomorrow or the next day, whether it will be next summer or not.”
In a moment in the film that is both intense and intimate, Carme Elias talks about the here and now of the actors, but adds that this is a deception because she can no longer choose herself in the here and now. There’s a sense that ‘While You Are’ is a film made to capture the present. “This is a movie in the present, live,” Pinto tells us. “The actors, or depending on which actor, because each one works in his own way, so that we do not miss the mark, taking into account the here and now,” Elias explains. “I mean, when you’re acting you’re still thinking about the things you have to do tomorrow, because that happens when you have so many functions, you break away from the character you’re playing for a moment, but you continue with the character. It is this memory that arises in the moment that must be avoided.”
Elias says that acting is purifying, and at one point in the film, a doctor says that this documentary is useful: “Purification means giving a piece of yourself to the characters you portray. It’s cleansing in that sense because it allows you to see a part of yourself that needs attention. And of course it helps, I am an actor and the camera brings you to life.”
But they started doing it like it was something very intimate for the two of them, and suddenly it took on a collective significance. “If they had told us this movie would be released, I honestly don’t know if we would have done it. “This is a huge responsibility,” says Pinto.
The film was made this way because of the actor’s blind trust in the director: “Carmen is an actress who has always taken great care of her private life and is very sure of what to show and what not to show. “And suddenly we’re making a film about what you hold on to when you’re fading away, how an actress with no memory can continue to be an actress, the transformative power of art.” It’s not easy, it can’t be. “You can hide everything and cover your head with a sheet at night and cry,” the actor explains very graphically.
To say or not to say
Elias received the Gaudi Honor Award in 2021, but he had not yet made the decision to publicly reveal that he had Alzheimer’s disease. “I know I thought about whether I should say it or not,” he tells us, “but I thought it was inappropriate, like screwing up an act that belonged to everyone, putting the personal before a collective story.” He said this at the Brain Film Festival in 2022: “It was difficult to decide, then you experience strange fears, you think they will overpower me, they may follow me to rob me, you feel helpless. But then you see that this thing is not going as fast as you thought. “At this point I thought I wasn’t going to be here anymore.”
Pinto’s challenge was to make an invisible disease visible in the images. It’s all improvisational, intuitive. “The project was opened but the movie was finished. We started filming it as if it were our own thing, but after Carmen’s decision to go public with her situation, we decided it made sense to make it public,” Pinto observes. He adds: “Filming is something that helps us both. Therefore we decided to finish it, but without closing ourselves to the possibility of continuing to record and adding or not adding a new version or an epilogue in the future if it suits us. “We left the door open, but the movie that was released was finished perfectly.” And above all, make “a very intimate, experiential film” that is also a “story of friendship,” Elias concludes.