The ship-breaking yard appears to be the perfect filming location for Abisal, that deals with spirituality and ghostly presence. How did you come up with this idea? 
We discovered the ship-breaking yard by navigating through Google Earth. From a satellite view, Bahía Honda is full of small, rectangular-shaped spots. Understanding that they were destroyed ships in a ship-breaking yard was a fundamental revelation to undertake this project and a great motivation to meet the people working there, those bodies that the satellite is unable to register. When we finally had access to the port, it was a challenge to find a nucleus from which to position ourselves to record this space. After casting more than 20 shipbreakers, we met Pitufo. His apparent fragility and his desire for freedom captivated us. Through him we discovered a very special way of understanding death and freedom. The shipbreaker are the last inhabitants of these ships, in their own way, they too are trapped in these spaces. Many are serving some kind of sentence and they dream of getting away from the bay. Each boat is a possibility of escape that they themselves must destroy. Through Pitufo we enter a territory inhabited by fears and dreams that not even fire can consume. Abisal is the record of this strange limbo, a territory in which we are all condemned to remain.

Do you consider cinema is a good means to explore spirituality?
Yes, I am very interested in approaching cinema as an animist experience, a marvelous invention that allows us to beat death, even if only for an instant. In that illusion lies my fascination. Everything we film is condemned to remain and that makes us have a very special awareness of those moments that we decide to filter through the camera. For that reason, I try to film each action as if it were a ritual, in which each gesture or look is decisive to generate a state, an experience. The projection of a film functions as a kind of misa (mass). People of the most dissimilar creeds and religions gather around it. We all understand the language of this liturgy that is barely a hundred years old. During these short sessions, we find a reflection of ourselves that is difficult to find in other spaces.

In your opinion, what was this mysterious light the character is talking about?
I don’t dare to define that image. I think that being a narrated story gives it a greater mystery and ambiguity. The word makes the image more indefinite. Registering this moment helped us to define the presence of other lights in the film, such as the lighthouse, the boats, the lanterns in the corridors, the sun… The lights transform the space and the characters, giving them a new quality. We tried to make that magical dimension of Pitufo’s story radiate throughout the film. 

Abisal has been selected in many prestigious film festivals in 2021 (Visions du réel, Raindance…). What do you hope the trajectory of Abisal will be like into the festival circuit? 
We are very surprised and happy with the route that Abisal is having. It is a particular film because the space is very spectacular but the narrative thread that connects them is so fragile. Connecting with the public and seeing how our ideas have found a safe harbor in such prestigious festivals leaves us very satisfied. Being in Clermont is a dream coming true. European festivals have been very generous in welcoming this type of more oblique cinema, now the challenge is move to America and see how Abisal navigates that side of the world.

Is there a particular short film that has made a strong impression on you? 
In fact, there are two Cuban short films from this year that have impressed me a lot and that have been screened at very prestigious festivals such as Rotterdam and Sundance. I am referring to El Rodeo by Carlos Melian and Tundra by José Luis Aparicio. Two fugues within the more traditional fiction that is usually distilled on the island. By playing with cinematic genres, each one proposes a very powerful vision of the madness and disenchantment that plague Cuba. Their characters move in strange limbos, traversing territories that have never been explored before. Cinematographically, they are full of discoveries. 

What’s your definition of a good film?   
It is very difficult to establish that definition, it varies according to each film. I think a good film should provoke us to move our valuation structures, generating some kind of crisis in our perception. This of course is very difficult to happen in commercial cinema. It is very exciting when a film confronts us with a new imaginary or with experiences that are completely foreign to us, when through the other we discover tools that allow us to face our life in a completely new way.

Abisal [Abyssal] is being shown as part of International Competition I2.