Winner of the Goya Award for Best New Director for Estiu 1993, Carla Simón explored the technical resources she has developed throughout her career – resources that have become a valuable point of reference for Audiovisual Communication students and for students across the Faculty.

The creative process and the script: a wish list

Using family photographs as a starting point, Carla Simón began shaping the creative process behind Estiu 1993, the film that brought her widespread acclaim and revealed the artistic world surrounding the filmmaker. “There are many ways to begin a creative process, and in this case, it started by revisiting these family photographs,” she explained as she showed them. “By coincidence, or perhaps not, many of the frames in the film ended up resembling these photographs from the 1990s,” she added.

To these references, she also incorporated the mood video technique – a collection of scenes from other films that helps her explain to the team the aesthetic and artistic vision she has for each project. For her, writing a script is “a wish list. What do you want to appear in the film? Which images, lines, characters or situations? Little by little, this list begins to take shape,” she explained, as she displayed personal notes that formed part of the creative process behind her films.

Rehearsal and pre-shoot improvisation: key elements in Carla Simón’s cinema

In Estiu 1993, Carla Simón worked with two young girls aged four and seven. “We spent months before filming with the girls, recreating moments with the other characters in everyday situations: celebrating birthdays, going shopping, having arguments. This is my approach to directing. If you suddenly tell a very young child that a woman she has never met is her mother in the film, it is far more difficult for it to feel believable,” she explained.

For this reason, Carla Simón approaches casting in a distinctly personal and intuitive way. “I like to understand an actor’s background; for Alcarràs, I knew from the outset that they needed to be people deeply rooted in the local area,” she recalled. “We travelled through villages in Lleida in a caravan, looking for the people who would eventually form the cast. There is no single casting method – there are many ways of finding the right people,” noted the director, whose films are characterised by their strong focus on family relationships. “Choosing an actor or a location, is much like falling in love; you must feel a genuine spark. If you don’t, it is better to walk away,” she concluded.

Finally, Carla Simón encouraged students to make the kind of cinema “that moves them”. Responding to students’ questions, she insisted that there is not “one single form of cinema, but the one you choose to make”.

The Faculty of Communication Sciences offered the masterclass thanks to the initiative of lecturer and UIC Barcelona doctoral candidate Raquel Ibáñez.