We’re dedicating the next three weeks to some of our favorite filmmakers in competition at this year’s edition of the Festival de Cannes.

As Carla Simón completes her recent cycle of family films with the Cannes-bound Romería we return to one of her earlier shorts, in which she draws upon her late mother’s correspondence in an attempt to better understand her past. Combining archival Super-8 footage of Simón’s mother, Neus Pipó, with steady long takes of the places she ambled about in her youth, Lacuna operates like a cinematic séance, recovering the memories of a woman whose life was cut short due to AIDS-related complications.

A self-described “experimental short” that came about through personal impulses and research, Lacuna represents a crossroads in Simón’s career, melding her interest in familial introspection with her love of letters. Simón has excelled in both of these fields, lauded for her personal storytelling — examples include Summer 1993 and Golden Bear winner Alcarràs — as well as the sharpness of her epistolary Correspondence (a collaboration with the Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor). Moving between these different registers, the pithy Lacuna acts like a skeleton key of sorts for the director, whose work so often contends with the pangs and limits of memory.

“It was very hard for me to discover I had no memories of my biological mum. It was sad and frustrating because you cannot invent a memory, you can only take over someone else’s memories, but I would have loved to have my own. Actually, while I was writing the script [for Summer 1993] I decided to take some of the letters that my mum wrote to her friends and go to the places where she wrote them. I made a short film called Lacuna, combining the reading of these letters with shots of these empty places. It was a beautiful and personal project that helped me to feel closer to her.” CARLA SIMÓN

 

While a sense of absence, or omission, is understood from the English title “Lacuna,” it’s worth noting that “La Cuna” also means “The Crib” in Spanish. Intended or not, Simón presents us with a paradox, placing a life lost and a new life within the same narrative. Her cinema is full of such contradictions, much like life itself.

Born and raised in rural Catalonia, Carla Simón makes films that draw upon her memories of childhood and the pastoral landscape that defined it. Her films also contend with the memory of her parents, both of whom passed away due to AIDS-related complications when she was six. After being awarded a scholarship for an MA at the London Film School, Simón directed a series of critically-acclaimed short films that inspired her feature debut, Summer 1993. After a few more shorts, she directed Alcarràs, winner of the Golden Bear at the 2022 Berlin Film Festival. Her newest film will make its premiere In Competition at Cannes within the coming weeks.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer.