By Juan Medina
Olivia Luengas is a Mexican filmmaker who trusts the honesty of documentary cinema. Away from Meaning (Lejos del sentido, 2018), a deep and complex portrait of her sister Liliana who suffers from borderline personality disorder, marks her first feature film. The moving documentary will have its digital world premiere on Sunday, March 29, 2020, as the inaugural film of The Cinema Tropical Collection. We spoke to the filmmaker in anticipation of the international streaming of her film.
Can you talk about the idea of using the natural landscape as a strategy for representing your sister's experience? Was it an idea you had in advance or did it occur to you as you were filming and putting together the movie?
Well, I always wanted to include the image of the volcano, but as we progressed with filming that idea evolved and gained more sense. I really like the elements of nature, I feel that nature has the ability to evoke many things. It’s a bit like music. Being in front of such an imposing natural landscape evokes a whole set of emotions and sensations. So, I always wanted to have the volcano in the movie.
At first it was just a matter of geographic location, but not even in the sense of letting the viewer know that the story was set in Puebla, Mexico, but simply that in that city there was a volcano. But as I was working on the film I remembered a T.V. program that the city government aired when the volcano began to erupt. It was called "Let's Learn to Live with the Volcano” and what it explained was that the volcano was going to continue to have eruptions and that it was not possible to predict or prevent them, that we needed to learn to live with them and know what measures to take when they happened.
And all of that seemed to me like an analogy that was very "ad hoc" with Liliana’s story, which is the same thing: crises cannot be prevented, but you do have to know how to handle them. Also, that it was all part of her nature. So, there was a game with "the inevitable" that served me very well to talk about human nature and nature itself. In addition to all of that, on a visual level I have always had a fascination with the monumentality of the volcano.
Your sister Liliana is much more than a documented subject or a character in the documentary. She not only stars in the film, but also provides the moving narration that we listen to in the voice-over. Could you comment on what this process of family co-authorship was like? Did the documentary provide the opportunity to discover your sister's writing?
Before we began to make the documentary, Liliana had already published a book titled Yo, suicida (I, a suicide). She always liked to write, and I always liked how she wrote. I really like her ability to see things from a general perspective, and at the same time be able to focus on the details. I really like the way she looks at the world, it seems to me that it is a different point of view from mine and I always admired that.
At first, the documentary was not going to be about Liliana, but about her friend Carlos. Due to issues with the permits and other inconveniences, it was not possible. We then decided that the film would be about Lili, which ended up being very convenient because of that quality of hers, that ability that she has to explain what happens inside. Having Liliana and her texts worked perfectly with my eagerness to talk about mental illness from those who live with it.
So, a large part of that voice of the documentary are fragments of her book and texts that she writes for a blog of hers called Bienvenida Locura, which was also the first name we gave to the project, when it was only a short film. We also gave her a tape recorder for her to make some sort of diary, and with all of those elements we put together a puzzle. Similarly, for the hallucination in the beginning of the film, it was Lili who described her own experience to us and from that description Odín Acosta —who is the sound designer—and I tried to make an audiovisual reenactment. The truth is we worked really closely with Lili through the whole process of making the film.
In Away from Meaning it seems like your position is somewhere in between two extremes: distant observation and direct intervention. Was that meditated and measured during the preparation of the documentary or did your appearances on camera take place naturally and organically?
From the moment we started working with the project, many people suggested that the film should be about Liliana. One of the reasons why I was a little reluctant about that idea was knowing that in order to do so, I would have to talk about my family and about myself. I wasn’t very enthusiastic about that. But with time I realized that making the documentary about her could fit perfectly with the objectives of the project, which from the beginning were to talk about mental health and give a testimony so that other families and people who live something similar know that there are other people in the same situation and in this way contribute to fight the stigma. When I understood all of that, I relaxed a little. Of course, I talked to my family, I explained how we were going to do things and they agreed. I remember the moment that made me change my mind. It was when my dad told me that if the film was going to help other families feel less alone, then keep going.
Now, if I am not so present in the film it is first because the story was about Liliana and not about me, and second because I had not lived with them for more than 20 years when we filmed the movie, so when I was at their house I was like an external agent that changed the dynamics between the three of them. However, while we were doing the editing, the editor, Clementina Matellini, and I realized that there were several moments when Liliana mentioned me or spoke to me and we knew that this could confuse the viewer. So, we looked for a way to give some consistency to my appearances.
We decided that I had to appear at the beginning, in the presentation of the family members, and later to remind viewers that there was another member of the family there, behind the camera. That is why we included several scenes in which I entered into the shot, especially situations in which they had a problem that they could not solve, and I came in to help them. For example, the Skype scene and the fumigator scene. There is also the kitchen scene, when Liliana is finally hospitalized. I had to be there with them, I had to be part of the family again.
The documentary conveys various political comments: it questions our concepts of normality, denounces the precariousness of mental health, etc. However, these political aspects are not exposed so openly. In this sense, you move away from the more expository mode of documentary allowing yourself some formal freedom. How important was the formal experimentation in making this film?
It was very easy for me to think that the film was going to start with the news of the closing of the hospitals. It was a very attractive topic and it caused a lot of outrage at that time. Although, fortunately Liliana's situation was not as complicated as that of other people who lived in hospitals and had no one else to take care of them, I did find it very attractive to have a more activist and denouncing approach. But I also think that a story that generates empathy and with which people can identify can have an even greater impact, even if it is not at the level of mobilizing people.
Also, it would be very pretentious for me to think that a project of mine can mobilize people. It is not an idea that I dislike, but I feel that I would need to do something very powerful in order to achieve something like that. In any case, it was not what I proposed to do in my debut feature. So, rather than addressing that more political and activist part, I preferred to concentrate on Liliana's story and in the study of how she lives with a psychiatric disorder. The truth is that I would have liked to have had more time and resources to experiment with different formal aspects. But at that moment we really gave the best of ourselves and our capacities. Now, after having learned more things and having had the time to revisit and analyze the film, I can think of things that could have been done differently. But at the time, we just completed the film once we understood that we already had the best version.
The documentary reveals that the possibility of enjoying a “normal life”, without major mishaps or setbacks, is a privilege intersected not only by considerations of class, gender and race, but also by health. How do you see your documentary in light of the current world crisis, when everyone has had to put their lives on pause? Does it acquire a new meaning in the middle of this generalized crisis?
This question is a bit complicated. I feel like I still can't see the general map of what is happening. I feel like I have everything right here in front of me and that I can only see a few things. And I am sure that it is not just me whom the future seems very uncertain. I know that many things are going to change and although we are all waiting or longing to return to the “normality” that we had, I am convinced that thing will not be the same. Which is sad, but it's also exciting. And it also seems to me that this question of normality is related to our concept of what mental health is. We understand that mental health is having control of our desires and our emotions, and pretending to have a certain stability: following the rules, being discreet, not getting angry, not saddening.
And yet, the human needs to feel and manifest those feelings. So, I think that we have a very contradictory and tangled discourse about what is “normal” and what is not, and about what it is to have a good mental health. In the end, as the t-shirts we made to publicize the film say, “Yo tampoco soy una persona normal” (I’m not a normal person either), I don't think anyone should try to fit into that concept of normality. At this time, we should not restrict or limit our feelings. We have to try not to be left alone and maintain our capacity to share our feelings with others. We also need to be able to listen and empathize with each other. I think that honesty is going to be very important now that our routines and our concepts of normality are falling apart. To the extent that we can talk and be empathetic and tolerant with each other, I believe that to that same extent we are going to achieve a more diverse, less violent and more caring world, which is what we need the most right now.
