Juan Diego Alt He makes his directorial debut with ‘En los margines’, A film that tries to address the issue of evictions from a humane and honest perspective, focusing on the characters and their struggle for dignity. It’s a job he’s been immersed in for years with his partner, journalist Olga Rodríguez, trying to pour out a large part of the stories they’ve compiled together out of respect and political and social justification.
Have you always wanted to steer?
I thought about it once, but it wasn’t something I really wanted. I’ve always loved storytelling, and I found a place for it in the theatre.. The good thing about this case was that it came naturally, we started a very long research process and when we were done I showed the script to some friends (including Fernando León de Aranoa and Penélope Cruz) and they told me the same thing. I must do this. It didn’t make sense to me either.
How did you want to approach the story?
There was a premise that we tried to follow as we worked: try to make everything as real as possible. Capture this precarious world and capture it almost documentaryly, as if we were describing what we saw. That’s why we almost always use a handheld camera as well as long lenses to offer an observational perspective. Also, there was something sensory that I was trying to capture, instability. They are characters who are always on the brink of the abyss, so I wanted the audience to feel their uncertainty, that uncomfortable feeling of something not quite settled down, embodied, dizzy and nauseated.
Does this have anything to do with the fact that the movie takes place in 24 hours?
Throughout all the stories, the feeling that you could be evacuated at any moment was always repeated. They are the people who live under the sword of Damocles.is subject to constant pain. It is an agony that can last for years but that we try to fit into a single day.
Do you think there are prejudices against social cinema in Spain?
I do not dare to answer this, but I think that cinema does not live on the borders of society and its movements are produced accordingly. Just as we stopped talking about evictions to talk about occupation in the last decade because there has been a shift to the right in society as a whole, movies are no stranger to the moment we live in. Our cinema is very diverse, but precariousness rarely counts.
Is there a direction in our cinematography that you think we’re advancing?
The much-criticized quota policy decision was an undeniable success. I think the most important thing that has happened to Spanish cinema in a long time is the emergence of new directors and screenwriters who contribute to stories we didn’t have before and miss.
She seems to want to pay her respects to the female warriors in the movie.
we understand that 80% of the participants in the housing councils were women. What we saw was that men were more embarrassed to admit poverty and accept their situation. However, there was an empowering effect on them, they were the ones who took the initiative, and this often resulted in cases of mistreatment, domestic violence, because the man’s authority was questioned. But we didn’t want to introduce ourselves there because they used to say that we reinvent ourselves in tragedy, even though the truth always exceeds the fiction.
What do you think the reaction of the movie rights will be?
If I showed you my Twitter timeline, it would be full of insults. One of the most repeated is ‘subsidized’. A member of parliament yesterday VOX He wrote that ‘squatters are not heroes, they are criminals’. They obviously haven’t seen the movie because it’s not about that, but they’re interested in scaring the public with the rhetoric going in that direction. They also tell me that I am a scoundrel and that no one will watch it because they will boycott the movie.
After the success of the theatrical production ‘A Year Without a Moon’ and his participation in the ‘Suicide Squad’…
I gave the movie to James Gunn! At first I didn’t imagine myself in that universe, but it was an incredible experience. Of course, the opposite of On the Margins…