By Juan Medina
Filmmakers Natalia Cabral (Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) and Oriol Estrada (Capellades, Spain) met while studying at Cuba’s International School of Film and Television of San Antonio de los Baños. They have been working together since 2012, when they launched their production company Faula Films. During these past eight years they have directed three feature films: the documentary films Tú y Yo (2014), and Site of Sites / El sitio de los sitios (2016), and the fiction film Miriam Miente / Miriam lies, winner of the Special Jury Mention at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival.
Their debut documentary feature Tú y Yo, had its world premiere at the Visions du Réel film festival in Switzerland, and received numerous awards in different film festivals including Cartagena, Trinidad & Tobago, Habana, and Cine Las Américas, among others. We spoke to Natalia and Oriol in occasion of the international streaming premiere of Tú y Yo as part of The Cinema Tropical Collection.
To start off, I would like you to tell us a bit about your initial approach to Aridia and Francisca (the Doña) and why you decided to make a documentary about them.
Natalia Cabral: Back then, in 2012, we were living in Spain and visited the Dominican Republic. At the time, we had a project, Miriam Lies, for which we were looking for production and financing, and in the meantime we stayed at the house of Aridia and the Doña (the lady of the house), who is my grandmother. We stayed with them for a few months and every day we went out to meet with investors and producers. It was the first months of the Cinema Law (Law for the Promotion of Cinematographic Activity in the Dominican Republic) and we didn’t know exactly how the law worked or what we had to do in those meetings. We always came back a little disappointed and in no mood to continue with everything else. Every time we came home we found Aridia and Doña doing their things - their daily chores and errands, arguing or laughing at something they saw on TV. They were always kind of immersed in their world, in the little world they had there and that they shared.
So, one day, while we were talking about what we were going to do with the project, how we were going to make Miriam Lies come to life, we started listening to them. They were in the kitchen and Doña was reading the newspaper to Aridia because she can’t read. And as we listened to them, we looked at each other and said, “Wow! This is an interesting scene. Why don't we get our equipment out tomorrow and film them, just to see what happens?" And that's how we started, little by little, without any pretensions and without expecting that a movie would come out of it. We just wanted to see what could happen and how they were going to react.
The documentary puts forward some fairly intimate scenes from the daily lives of these women. However, neither of them seems bothered by the presence of the camera in such a private space. Could you tell us about the filming process?
NC: Well, I remember that in the beginning Aridia and Doña didn’t take us seriously; at first we told them that it was just a kind of rehearsal, a test that we were doing with our equipment. I remember that it was after a few weeks that we told them we were making a movie. But even then they still didn’t take us seriously, I think because for them cinema is something else… To make a movie is not to just film a maid and her employer, but to film famous people, important people, perhaps people from the United States.
So they didn't take us seriously and I think that’s what made them go with the flow. I also have to say that the relationship between them is very passionate. When they’re arguing, when they’re doing their things, anyone outside of the situation is only a spectator. They don’t care who might be there, they’re on their own and they fight or do whatever and it’s a spectacle to watch them. Perhaps we felt the curiosity to film them in the first place because of that sense of witnessing a performance when you see them.
Over time and after having made Site of Sites, we came to realize that we’re attracted to those types of people—very performatic people who seem to be so sure of themselves, of how they live their lives and of what they think, and who seem almost like characters. And when you turn on the camera and set your shot, you just have to let yourself be carried away by them—by their lives, their activities, and their ideas. You have to trust in reality and be a bit of an adventurer, to see where it takes you.
However immersive and endearing the relationship between Doña and Aridia may be collides head on with the differences in class and race that intersects it. What strategies do you think allowed you to capture this ambiguity?
Oriol Estrada: Well, it was precisely that ambiguity that you’re commenting on that made us want to make the film. That is, on the one hand, the warmth of the relationship, and on the other, the separation, the racism, and the latent conflict between them so marked by class differences. In a way, it was the union of those two extremes that motivated us to start filming them. If their relationship was only warm and friendly there would have been nothing interesting to document.
Just as if it were the opposite: if it were only a relationship of an employee fighting all day with her employer for reasons of race or class, then I don't think it would be very interesting either. What caught our attention was that complexity. How these two things could be happening at the same time and, in addition, without they themselves being aware of it. It was in that ambiguity that we saw the possibilities for a film, and it was also a way to talk about all of the topics that interest us such as classism and social and family relationships.
On top of this, there was also the question of how to manage capturing this complexity, because I think it’s a matter of sensitivity and having the ability to observe and see it. The challenge then was to reconstruct it during editing. We did about three months of filming, so we had a lot of material; we had to maintain that balance and make sure that non of the aspects weighed more than the other. We had to make sure that the portrait of their relationship was not chosen for its fraternal side, nor for the racial or class conflicts present.
Francisca's (La Doña) garden is also both beautiful and oppressive. Do you think a correlation could be made between the architecture of the house and its garden and the complex relationship between the two women?
OE: Following the idea of contrast, on an emotional level, that you posed in the other question, I think we did look to extend that to the physical space because it is a film with very few elements—basically two people inside a house. So we asked ourselves how the house itself could take part in all of that.
We started the process by living with them for some time, and then we spent another three months filming. So we had a lot of time to study the space, the little details and the leisurely moments, those moments when apparently nothing happened. A very important space for the Doña was the garden; she spent many hours in that garden and while being there she would talk to Aridia. Very nice conversations took place in that garden. So, certainly, we looked for a way to put into conversation the beauty of the garden and those pleasant moments with the moments of conflict, which happened suddenly. They could go quickly from moments of calm and tranquility to moments of tension.
There is a recurring shot in the film that we discovered while filming the house. Many people have asked us about it, because they can’t tell very well what it is. It’s a shot of the garden in which there’s a water tank. It’s like a dome, an oval metal structure in the middle of the garden, surrounded by lush flowers. It’s a somewhat strange image, because within the image itself there’s a contrast. The curious thing is, we did that fixed shot many times. Then while editing we used it in different parts of the film—sometimes on a sunny day, other times with rain, always depending on the narrative moment, on the tension or calm that there could be between Aridia and the Doña at a certain moment.
In that sense, I feel like the shot served as a catalyst for the situations between them. Because it’s the same space, but I think it gets tinted by the tension between the two of them. Or perhaps it’s the other way around, the two women interfere with our perception of that same image. A kind of Kuleshov effect.
And well, that was one of the challenges of the film. To see how the house could transmit the same tension and ambiguity that existed between them.
