Notas de dirección // Director’s note

“Water and more water” comes from the combination of filmmaking fever, chance, and theft.

Since my studies in Cuba in 2016, I’ve become fascinated by experimental and hand processing film. I love the image texture, I love the state of blindness during shooting compared to video making, and the fragility of the revealing process.

When I came back to live in Barcelona after several years abroad, I was eager to shoot with my Trimax double8: an old film camera that my grandfather was using 50 years ago.

It took some time before I could make my wish come true because the camera presented some technical challenges due to its age, the lack of an instruction manual and it not being as user-friendly as Super8 home movie cameras.

Exposure was a particularly important aspect because I wanted to shot in “double exposure”, which consists of shooting two times the same film.

First of all, I could have only an idea of how images were going to overlap, since there is no frame counter.

Second, as a double8 film, I needed to take out the film from the camera and place it back flipped on the “other side” 4 times: 2 times for the first round, and 2 times for the second round of shooting.

Third, the camera itself has a problem that I discovered while making “Water and more water”: from time to time it gets stuck, and I need to take out and put back the film roll, which I was doing in the street with a portable darkroom.

Inevitably, chance was deeply involved in this film, or even invoked onto it.

A way to put myself, as a filmmaker, in a place of openness toward a cosmic imagination, which is limitless, unlike mine. In other words, I wanted to work with a material that could inspire me and lead me trough an unpredictable path.

Stealing was not in the original plan.

What I planned was to create a voice over because it was something I had never done before, yet I had no particular idea as to how to go about it.

When I actually saw the film for the first time (its digitalization to be exact), I had the intuition to create an “I remember” text about my years in Barcelona from 2006 to 2010, inspired by Joe Brainard, who had already inspired “Je me souviens” de Georges Pérec.

The collage approach reminds me of the human memory process and gives freedom of interpretation, two aspects that I look for in cinema.

I robbed with no shame, because “I remember” was what I was living when I was shooting the film. I was watching Barcelona again and I could not help but compare everything with my memory of it. The vision of my memory was overlapping the vision of my eyes, like the film images were overlapping in double exposure.

Finally, the soundtrack tries to create an alchemy of music, environment sounds and filmmaking noises. A place where the inside meets the outside.