Estiu 1993 (Summer 1993)

Some people say that it's impossible to make a film that is not personal, that, at different levels, every filmmaker will imprint some part of their lives in the movies they make. When most of the time, this assertion means that the filmmakers have to rely on their experiences to get a story that gets modified to fill a fiction narrative, there at times when the auteurs decide to expose themselves fully in order to imprint their own life, in the truest form possible, in the screen.

Catalan director Carla Simon makes her opera prima a recollection of her own memories as a child, focusing on the way she experienced the Summer of 1993, the year her mother died and she had to go to love with her uncle and aunt in the rural Catalonia. What she achieves is a deeply emotional film about how a kid comes to terms with the death of the most important person in her life.

The film is always told from the perspective of Frida (the cinematic alter-ego of Simon), always holding the information that the adults consider she might not be able to grasp, but like her, we are able to perceive that things are not going well from small comments here and there, and by the way people behave with her. The word AIDS is never mentioned, but soon it becomes evident that it was the cause of the death; but of course, this is not clear for a six year-old girl.

This film could be charming and innocent, but what it elevates it to a different level is the fact that, without showing it, it also contains within it another very different film, a tragic one of disease, an imminent death, and the feeling of grieve. We never get to see Frida's mother (the film starts when she leaves Barcelona to go with her new adoptive family), but Simon is incredibly intelligent to show us how was the girl's life when her mother was still alive without recurring to flashback scenes. Probably the best scene in the whole film is when Frida paints her face with heavy make-up, dresses-up, and plays to be the mother of her cousin, behaving with her in the way that we assume her own mother would have behaved with her.

And if Simon was able to wrote brilliant scenes, they would have been meaningless if it hasn't been because of that miracle of casting that is Laia Artigas. The young actress is just brilliant, an owner of a charisma and deep personality that creates a deeply complex character, revealing the layers of emotion that even young kids have. But seeing that the other girl in the film, Paula Robles as Frida's cousin-turned-sister, is as good, we certainly should give the credit to Simon for her superb work directing kids.

Even if the second part of the film is not as perfect as the first, we finish with a bittersweet accumulation of feelings towards this history and its fantastic characters. If this history has all the elements of a melodrama, it is clever in avoiding clichés and instead presenting a truthful recollection of instants to tell a intimate history full in its humanity and its sincerity.