“The Remnants of You”, interview with director Gala Gracia

At the 16th Bari International Film & Tv Festival, FRED Film Radio interviewed the director Gala Gracia to talk about “The Remnants of You”, a film presented at the Meridiana section.

A therapeutic story

“The Remnants of You” has some autobiographical elements. Was it therapeutic for Gala Gracia to be able to direct and tell this story? “I think most of the people that do the first movie have a very shocking experience in their lives. And at some point it’s kind of therapeutic to write about this. At least the first draft of the script. For me it was like that”, says the director. “I had this idea because I felt a lot of pain because of the death of my father. I must say that the first draft of the script was more attached to the reality of what happened, but as I rewrote the script it started to be less autobiographical”.

Desire and expectations

The main character of “The Remnants of You” tries to reconcile her desires and the expectations that people have on her. How did Gala Gracia manage to write and work on this balance? And how does this aspect reflect her own experience? “The death of her father for the protagonist means that she has to leave behind the life that she had as a pianist in New York and to assume the reality. In my personal experience I had to come back from London, because I was living there. I was exploring life in a foreign country”, remember the director. “Sometimes you have to stop your life to do another completely different thing that you didn’t expect, because I had to be in charge of a sheep farm that I had with my father and my sister. When he died, we had to work on it. I tried to balance Sara’s desire of coming back to New York and the weight of the guilt that is stopping her”.

The music

Sara is a jazz musician and “The Remnants of You” uses music in a narrative way. “In the movie there are two main aspects that belong to the father. One is the obvious one: the sheep and all the farming around their lives. And the other one is the music, because the father is a fanatic of jazz music and it’s what links him to his daughter”, says Gala Gracia.

The wrong face of globalization

Many movies of the Meridiana section at Bif&st share the same themes. “I think this is because of the changes in the world”, underlines Gala Gracia. “We are connecting to our roots, because we are starting to see the wrong face of globalization and now we are immersed in so many theories about defending, going back to the origin, or defending more sustainable models. We have to step backwards again, think about our origin, our roots, our family. All these themes, maybe, that now we are touching in cinema as well”.

Plot