Carlos Martínez-Peñalver Mas presents his first feature film, À procura da estrela, in the Tierres en trance Official Selection. He does so accompanied by the leading actor Joel Fontan Martínez and the producers Nico Martínez Millán and Arnau Abella Travesset. The film «arises from an encounter with a fable of the place that gives its name to the Serra da Estrela». Xoel is a phonographer who arrives there to record the endangered sounds of the highest mountain in mainland Portugal, at the top of which there is a shopping centre. The filmmaker wanted to show «how the powers and companies make profit out of something that is not theirs» and «to deal with the theme of rural life from the perspective of creativity and the irony of political discourse», while at the same time he was interested in «working with the imaginary of the place and interpreting it from a contemporary perspective» and «capturing the spirit of the quest and the mysticism linked to the intangible».
À procura da estrela by Carlos Martínez-Peñalver Mas
The director stresses the importance of co-writing the script with the local people. «It’s something that gives those flashes of reality within the fiction that we propose». In the case of sound, it is of crucial importance: «it is the fifty percent that helps us to pull the story forward and fulfils an ecological function in the search for those sounds that disappear».
Carlos Martínez-Peñalver Mas, who has previously worked as an editor on several works, including his work as assistant editor on Mimosas (a film by Oliver Laxe that won an award at Cannes), points out that in this construction process the important thing is «basically to look for emotion, to build an emotional state that guides the film».
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