“The Kid in the Photo. Carlos Saura,” a portrait of the great Spanish filmmaker written and directed by daughter Anna Saura, will be brought to market at the Málaga Festival-Spanish Screenings by Latido Films.
Few biographies will be so intimate and knowing, made with such privileged insight. And necessary. Saura moved to an inviting large stone house in Madrid’s wooded mountains in Collado Mediano in the late 1980s. He spent the next 40 and more years making films but also taking continuing to take photos, while collecting cameras, sketching and painting.
“What does worry me to some extent has always been the recovery of memory. In Spain there’s a kind of widespread tendency to forget things,” Saura says in the doc feature’s final stretches when it begins to knit together his driving passions.
Like father, like daughter. “The Kid In The Photo. Carlos Saura” weighs in as an attempt to preserve his memory, legacy and essence, weaving often playful informal interview and occasional archive footage simply catching Saura at work at his mountain home, visiting Spanish villages or at rehearsals in Mexico on the set of The King of All the World.”
It nearly begins with a kid in a photo: Saura at four, he says, though he looks a shade older, caught in a posed photo. The child is wide-eyed, looking almost preternaturally alert.
“From when I was four to seven, when the Civil War ended, I remember almost every day,” he says in the doc-feature. One was particularly memorable. The first day he went to school, Franco’s airforce began bombing Barcelona. “I knew a bomb would hit the school,” he has said in interview. And it did “The bombing scene in “Cousin Angélica” is a transposition of my first day at school in Barcelona,” he recalls nearly 40 years later.
“The Kid in the Photo. Carlos Saura” allows the director to explain himself through his own words. If it has a thesis, teased by its own title, is that Saura was a Civil War child in so much of his mental makeup, in his dominant emotions, his endless curiosity, for the next near 90 years.
One was a horror of violence. Highlighted in the film, “The Hunt” (“La Caza”) follows three men, who fought together in the Spanish Civil War, on a rabbit hunt to a stark valley still pockmarked by dug-outs from the conflict. Goaded by jealousy and an authoritarian temperament’s sense of effrontery, they descend to the same barbaric violence of the Spanish Civil War, shooting one another.
“The present is a consequence of what happened yesterday and the day before yesterday. It seems to me that nothing should be forgotten,” Saura says in the “The Kid in the Photo.” He started taking photos from an early age, using his father’s camera. Then he bought himself a Leica M3. Every picture tells a story. Saura’s 1950s snaps of Spain’s postwar, caught in “The Kid in the Photo,” are very often of despair, hunger and horror. The shadow of Goya, also from Aragón, hangs over many shots. One captures a white concrete community mausoleum, its crypts often empty, like absent teeth cavities, its coffins stolen presumably for anything valuable inside. Two are dumped in the foreground on a heap of wood, one coffin minute, presumably of a child.
Childhood, “The Kid in the Photo” suggests, also gave Saura a love of arts. “His work, which includes more than 50 films, bears testimony of his passion for arts in all their forms,” says an end credit title.
That came in part from his parents, the doc-feature suggests. “I was born listening constantly to my mother doing piano exercises, early in the morning, always. She showed me that deep love for music which I still have,” Saura recalls in “The Kid in the Photo.”
This is also a very knowing portrait. Of all the facets of Carlos Saura, what does daughter Anna Saura key into first? His status in the world at large as Spain’s best known filmmaker who stool a stand against the horrors of the Spain created by dictator Francisco Franco? Or his awards, such as a Cannes Grand Jury Prize for “Raise Ravens” and Berlin Golden Bear with “Deprisa, Deprisa”?
Those indeed do feature in the documentary, as well as what the films meant: the deep dive into confused childhood, Saura’s lifelong sympathy for those on the margins.
Yet what daughter Anna Saura captures first in “The Kid in the Photo. Carlos Saura,” is father Carlos Saura trying to deliver an on-camera message apologizing for not getting to a premiere of “King of All the Worlds,” fluffing his lines and bursting into a broad smile.
Saura had a large sense of the humor, which struck those who got to know him, belying the sternness of his public visage with his playful banter and frequent chuckle.
Made up of original footage, save for excepts from TV interviews, “The Kid in The Photo” explains very well Saura’s changes of register as a filmmaker, from “The Delinquents,” made under the thrall of Italian neo-realism, to broader psychological introspection from The Hunt.” “I totally agreed [with Luis Buñuel]” that a realistic, social cinema representing Spain “could be done using more imagination, not fantasy but imagination based more than on memory itself but rather how we manipulate it,” Saura comments.
The film’s defining tenor, however, is its portrait of Carlos Saura at work, even in his late eighties. That made him happy. “The first thing I say is: ‘I’m 88 years old and how marvellous I’m alive.’ And when the sun rises it’s marvellous, it’s a great invention and I say: ‘How lucky to be alive.’ Saura enthuses in “The Kid in the Photo.” “Work for me isn’t work. The Chinese say that work is when you have to suffer. In this sense I don’t work.”
Saura never stopped not working – snapping photos, sketching, painting and painting photos. During his final illness, he took photos of the carers at his hospital. At the end, when painting, drawing or writing were made difficult by his hands shaking, he could still summon his strength to joke. “The painting we did the other day I liked a lot,” he tells Anna Saura. “But it looked like it was drawn by a schizophrenic. That’s why I liked it.”
Carlos Saura died shortly afterwards, on Feb. 10 2023, one day before he was due to accept an Honorary Goya for lifetime achievement.
“As one of my father’s sons, I am particularly touched by this incredible immersion by my sister into my father’s work. Also, to discover in Anna an incredible talent as a filmmaker, and her look into my father’s life and desth reminded me of the great work of Rebecca Miller about Arthur Miller,” said Antonio Saura, head of Latido Films.
He added: “We see a great potential among the distributors of my fathers movies in France, U.S., UK and Italy for example, and definitively a great festival run.”
A young Carlos Saura, in an image from ‘The Kid in the Photo. Carlos Saura’
Anna Saura fielded some questions from Variety in the run-up to the world premiere of “The Kid in the Photo” at Spain’s Málaga Festival on March 9.
You’ve become a kind of custodian of Carlos’ legacy, making an exhibition of his photos and sketches in Madrid, “Carlos Saura and Dance.” It seems to me that “The Kid In The Photo. Carlos Saura” aims at preserving his memory, capturing his legacy beyond his films and driving at part of his essence, simply catching Carlos at work and in conversation. But maybe I’m wrong….
Anna Saura: You’re absolutely right. My main goal with this documentary was to portray the person, Carlos being Carlos, beyond his great figure as a filmmaker. For me, it was very important to show what Carlos was like and how the passion he had for what he did was what gave him life and what keeps him alive. It’s very important to me that his legacy remains alive, that new generations can get to know him and can approach his films, his photographs, and his drawings.
The title is not casual. “The Kid in the Photo. Carlos Saura” suggest that Carlos can be explained in many ways by the kid and his Spanish Civil War experiences, whose traumas and joys he channelled into his films. Again, maybe I’m wrong….
The Spanish Civil War was undoubtedly what marked my father’s life the most, because he experienced it when he was very young, and the postwar period shaped his childhood, his adolescence, and his first years as a director. The title plays with that idea, with that child who is in the war. In fact, in the documentary he appears reading his memoirs and saying, “That child in the photograph is four years old…” referring to himself. But the title also refers to the fact that Carlos was always like a child, because until his very last days he had the curiosity that children have about everything. He always carried his camera with him and was always taking photographs, even when he could barely breathe.
When did you begin to shoot Carlos, and when did you begin to think about making a film? And how much film did you have to sort through?
During the trips we used to make to festivals or events, we would always record the journey like a kind of diary and he would edit it. So when mobile phones started to have good cameras, I began recording some clips of him with my phone during those trips. Around 2019, I thought about doing a long interview with him, because although he did many interviews to promote his projects, it was rare for people to ask him about things from his life — his childhood, his creative processes, and so on.
And a feature film?
I actually did that interview without a clear objective. Until he passed away in 2023, I kept filming small everyday moments, but never with a specific intention. It was about a year and a half ago, when I received development funding from the Community of Madrid, that I decided to seriously start making a film. After reviewing the material I had, I realized there were beautiful and unique moments, and I thought it could become a lovely film. During the process, of course, a lot of material had to be left out, which is always a bit painful, but I’m very happy with the result because I think it’s a honest portrait of him.
Does the film have original footage, such as Carlos’ explanation to camera of why he was going to make “El Dorado” and a project with Antonio Gades with Emiliano Piedra, not Elías Querejeta?
Yes, except for the archival material from television, all the footage that appears in the film is previously unseen. That self-confession about “El Dorado” was something we found in his archive, and I think it is very human and very sincere. It also shows an unknown side of Carlos, since he didn’t talk much about his feelings or his thoughts. The rest of the material was filmed by me over the years. I was fortunate to have unique and exclusive access, and to be able to capture some very special moments.
The film will discover for many surprising sides to Carlos, such as his sense of humor. You begin and nearly end with Carlos making jokes. That I think is deliberate….
Despite being a reserved person, my father had a great sense of humor when he felt at ease, and for me, that was something very important to show. Many people thought he was a very serious and a somewhat grumpy man, but I believe what he really had was shyness. Even in the most difficult moments, he always maintained his sense of humor.
It was important for me to show who he really was, since very few people knew what he was truly like behind the “persona.”
Carlos Saura, enjoying work Courtesy of Latido Films
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