Rodrigo García Barcha (Bogotá, 64 years old) wanted to recreate the scenes of large family meals from Italian cinema, but set them in the Guadalupe Valley, in the vast and green desert areas of the Baja California wine-growing region. He also wanted to accommodate a Mexican family there whose identity was based on the characteristics and customs of the area near the border. He also wanted the story he was making to be simple and show how complex and wonderful blood ties are in a single Sunday afternoon. That’s why he made “Familia”, a film production – the first in his repertoire as a director to be shot in Spanish and in Mexico – that premieres on December 15 on Netflix and tells the story of three sisters and a brother who are again getting together. at his father’s house to receive news about his future.
Leo is a grown man, a widower, who, together with his three daughters and his son Beny, owns a piece of land in northern Mexico where olive trees grow. He laughs and cries because men like him are rarely seen in public, maintaining a home in the maturity of their lives despite the absence of the clan’s mother. Araceli, artist, absent and yet, although dead, is the spirit around which develop the most intimate and violent expressions of love, hate and nostalgia, expressed at the table where daughters, sons, grandchildren and granddaughters sit. There is also Clara, Leo’s current partner, an intelligent, strong woman about 20 years his junior, sometimes overwhelmed by what she has to accept as part of the sentimental, sometimes wild and chaotic life of this tribe.
Rodrigo García identifies very much with Leo – the protagonist of Familia – and the fact that Mexican actor Daniel Giménez Cacho played him also contributed to this: “I let a lot of myself slip into Leo. But I’m not like him. I don’t have Leo’s problems or Leo’s circumstances. But he’s definitely very close to me. And strangely enough, Daniel and I were the only ones from that generation during filming. We both have children this age and have both been married for a long time. “I felt like we had some kind of connection and mutual understanding.”
García Barcha speaks with Daniel Giménez Cacho, portrayed as Leo, during the filming of the film. Alejandro Lopez Pineda (Netflix)
For García Barcha, Familia is “like a return home” from start to finish. A return to Mexico, where his father, Gabriel García Márquez, and his mother, Mercedes Barcha Pardo, built a life and literary myth in which he grew and developed. In a country where he was not born but where he lived the longest, he later settled in the United States and directed productions in English for more than 20 years – including several episodes of globally acclaimed series such as “The Sopranos ” or “Six”. Feet underneath.
In the book that the filmmaker wrote in 2021 with a dedication to his parents Gabo and Mercedes: A Farewell, he told intimately, with tenderness and iron sincerity, about his experience as part of this world-famous family clan and the reasons that led him to become away from the limelight that had attracted his family from an early age: “I didn’t realize until well into my forties that my decision to live and work in Los Angeles and in English was a conscious decision, an unconscious decision. to go my own way, away from my father’s sphere of influence.”
“Family” is not about your own family, but there are many themes in the film that touch and concern the director the most. For this reason, he was also very drawn to this story about men like him at a crucial moment in his life, which he had never seen on the big screen: “I don’t think I’ve seen it in Mexico or in Latin America , this film about a man who he is at the moment when he is no longer young, but not old either. And that interested me,” he says. He assures that Leo is “not an old-fashioned male patriarch” because of the closeness of his three daughters Rebeca (Ilse Salas), Julia (Cassandra Ciangherotti) and Mariana (Natalia Solián) They make the game of exchanging strength and power between them a shared game. The visions and decisions of each of them also influence the father, driving him into a corner and pushing him to his limits, wrapped between anger and affection and the impossibility of reaching an agreement on the future of his property. In this equation, Beny, the youngest son, seems like a figure frozen in time, the man who wants to be more independent, but at the same time is the only one who wants to follow his father and support him in the crisis decisions that affect his future determine. Future.
Women and parenthood
In “Family,” García Barcha decided to have three daughters — rather than two like he has in real life — to make it “a little more complicated.” One of the most powerful scenes in the film will be the intimate moment in which the three women talk about their own lives, remembering and also recalling the mistakes of the past, the dead mother and the father who is trying to reinvent himself in order to survive. The decisions of one will be questioned by the others, and they themselves will be at the limit of their emotions, trying to understand each other and how each lives with the decisions they have made for their lives. “All three are loving, generous and also very selfish. If the mother were alive, they would certainly blame her too. They would be unfair to her. But the mother is a completely idealized figure because she is dead,” he reflects.
Maribel Verdú plays Clara in “Familia” (dir. García Barcha, 2023). Alejandro Lopez Pineda (Netflix)
In an interview with TV UNAM in 2018, García Barcha said: “When I started writing my first script, they were supposed to have five different stories. The idea was that some would be about men and others about women, but I realized that the female characters suited me better.” For this project, the director relied on the actresses and the screenwriter Bárbara Colio – who helped to make the script, originally written in English, as close as possible to a Mexican family on the border in the United States – so that the women playing the main roles were closest to reality “and not women that a man imagined”.
The entire problem of the film, he concludes, can be summed up in what Mariana, the youngest, says to her sisters: “I only wanted two things in my life. My father’s approval and my father’s approval not necessary,” he says.
Sitting at the table, with watery eyes and a tense tone of voice so as not to break, Leo repeats to his daughters, his son and his grandchildren: “I understand my parents more and more and I love them more and more.” He tries unsuccessfully to explain how terrible he feels, the terror of the abyss, the fear of not knowing what comes next, the sadness of not being able to turn back time. García Barcha assures that this part was entirely his when he – finally – began to understand his parents. “I think parents grow a lot after they die, they become a lot taller. And yes, you do see them more clearly, but with discernment you also understand them better and forgive them more. And it’s not like there are many things to forgive. It’s what he says there, his deafness, his stupidity, his sadness. Because we can’t stand it when our parents are human, that they’re sad, that they feel like failures.”
The cast applauds Isabella Arroyo, portrayed as Amanda, at one point during filming. Alejandro Lopez Pineda (Netflix)
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