– This historical drama delving into Spain’s concentration camps, produced by Filmika Galaika and Umbracle Cinema, will premiere at FIDMarseille
Elsa Pereira in Letters from an Inner Exile
After taking part in the Last Push (Work in Progress) section of the third ECAM Forum a few days ago (see the news), the new work by Eloy Enciso, titled Letters from an Inner Exile, a historical drama toplined by Elsa Pereira, will have its world premiere on 8 July, in the International Competition of the FIDMarseille International Film Festival.
Its plot unfolds through the letters of Carmen and Ángel, two lovers trying to reunite during the final days of the Spanish Civil War, which are currently being researched by Elsa, a photographer travelling the country to document sites for a project related to Francoist repression. The news of a relative’s death forces her to put her work on hold, reconnect with her family and settle an unresolved matter of inheritance.
“The initial impulse for this feature arose when I discovered that my country’s film industry had never approached the reality of the concentration camps. How was it possible that there wasn’t a single film about a Francoist concentration camp when there were at least 200 across the country, while both Europe and Hollywood have produced thousands of films on the subject (a subgenre in itself)?”, the director wonders.
“The film emerges as a response to this gaping hole in memory. From a creative point of view, the main challenge was to make a movie about a subject not yet tackled that, paradoxically, wouldn’t feel like something we’d already seen. I was very concerned about avoiding certain clichés associated with concentration-camp cinema, while also believing it was important to recount what happened here,” Enciso continues.
“The story of Carmen and Ángel provided the solution, bearing in mind that, as in the finest literature on the camps (Levi, Semprún and so on), the most powerful approach was to portray the alienation inherent in the fascist machinery from the individual’s subjectivity. More than anything, I also wanted Carmen and Ángel, as a counterpoint and a reminder of what we essentially are, to speak as people who love, individuals who, in that hostile context, cling to it as a survival mechanism,” concludes the Galician filmmaker.
Enciso directed the documentaries Pic-nic (2007) and Arraianos, which premiered in Locarno’s Cineasti del presente section and won awards at other events. In 2019, he returned with his first fiction feature, Endless Night, which premiered in competition at Locarno and later screened at Toronto and IFFR, among others, also picking up several prizes.
Letters from an Inner Exile is a production by Beli Martínez for Filmika Galaika and Marina Perales for Umbracle Cinema.
(Translated from Spanish)
