“Another End”, interview with Gael Garcia Bernal and Bérènice Bejo

February 20, 2024

Gael Garcia Bernal: "The film is both a sci-fi fable and a romantic movie where things don't go as planned."

“Another End”, interview with Gael Garcia Bernal and Bérènice Bejo Chiara Nicoletti

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For his first feature film, “The Wait“, presented at the Venice Film Festival in 2015, sicilian director Piero Messina chose an international actress Juliette Binoche, as his protagonist. For his second feature, almost 10 years later, “Another End“, in competition at the 74Th Berlinale, he could again count on a stellar international cast composed by Gael Garcia Bernal, Bérénice Bejo, Renate Reinsve and Olivia Williams.

Bernal and Bejo play two brothers in an unidentified city of a possibile future where a new technology promises to ease the pain of separation by briefly bringing back to life the consciousness of those who have died. With the help of his sister, working for the company owning the technology, Bernal’s character, Sal, gets his wife Zoe to come back in the body of a compatible host, Ava (Renate Reinsve).

Messina’s new film is a love story, a story about grief, mourning and leaves us with an unanswered question and a lot of big questions: What makes us, us? memories? the people we love? What do we fall in love with when we meet a person?

Plot

Since Sal has lost Zoe, the love of his life, he has been living only in his memories: memories like fragments of a shattered mirror that cannot be put back together. Sal’s sister Ebe, who observes her brother with growing concern, suggests he turn to Another End, a new technology that promises to ease the pain of separation by briefly bringing back to life the consciousness of those who have died. Sal finds Zoe again in this way, but in the body of another woman. What was broken suddenly seems to come together again. But this joy is fragile, fleeting, treacherous. Can love truly survive as a secret guarded by the body?

Written by: Chiara Nicoletti

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