Theory of Affections: Carla Simón’s cinema 

The main theme that has always concerned Carla Simón is inherent to the great tradition of melodrama: family as a microcosm of societies, and the place occupied by women in this universe. “Women“ (2009, codirected with Marco Businaro) is emblematic of this recurrence, obsessively showing women in a series of symbolical predicaments alluding to motherhood, desire, affection, or frustration.  

With a personal history permeated by the intense 1980s in Spain – a decade of opening to a new political and sexual freedom –, Simón would see both her parents die of Aids. The affective dimension of loss and family as a place of love and conflict are felt both in her unique history and in the movies she has made, especially “Summer 1993“ (2017), her first feature, and “Las Pequeñas Cosas“ (2014): taking place on a Catalan village, it tells a simple story of a mother and her adult daughter, who live together and are both waiting for a visit from the son that is coming from the city with his girlfriend; the wait is inconsequential, but revealing of the small tensions between those two women, and the way that micro-family is illustrative of societal pressures between a contemporary modernity and the conservative traditions of Spain.

Perhaps one of the most powerful images in Carla Simón’s cinema is one she did not capture herself: the footage shot by her father when her mother, still young, wakes up in bed. By retrieving these specters – shot in film –, Simón brings to the surface a certain melancholy that will never leave her. These are recurrent images, both in “Llacunes“ (2016) and in “Correspondence“ (2020, codirected with Dominga Sotomayor, and screened at Curtas in 2020), and which cast a genetic, symbolic, familiar ballast on the images produced by the filmmaker. A ballast that, as seen in “Correspondence“, is a constant questioning of family ties, motherhood, or the fragility of emotional bonds. “Alcarrás“ (2022), which has its Portuguese première at Curtas after winning the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, is the continuation of this lineage, by portraying a family, in a village in Catalonia’s countryside, and the social, economic, climacteric disputes of this affective space.

During this decade as a filmmaker, Carla Simón has built a consistent body of work, which promises to insert itself in the arena of contemporary cinema and the simple stories that question the uniqueness of being human. 

Daniel Ribas