Early XNUMXth century. A teacher named Miguel (Tamar Novas) arrives in Lobosandaus, a village located in the Galician part of the border between Galicia and Portugal. A scientific person who faces his new life in a village full of mists and traditions. And the death of a neighbor begins to reduce any kind of border between life and death: Miguel sees how everything around him is darkening. In the words of the director, Ángeles Huerta, who is Asturian rather than Galician, 'O corpo aberto' “does not oppose the idea of progress against backwardness, but a secularized world against another with a connection to the spiritual” and superstitious.
The film germinated from a story by Xosé Luis Méndez Ferrín and, from there, the director and Daniel D. García —the other screenwriter— completed the rest to round off the story. Ferrín's story had "a handicap and an opportunity at the same time, which is that it was very brief." Conceived as epistolary, the blank lines turned into an enormous range of possibilities for Huerta, which opened up many cinematographic possibilities. Starting from the premise, Ferrín himself saw it fit very well on the big screen, the director told ABC: "It was a classic reading of the foreigner who came to a hostile town, it also had a bit of a western, elements typical of the Gothic genre. , the arrival in stagecoach…”. Huerta started with a good raw material that she knew how to work, and the figures in the room support her. At the beginning of the week, some 1.500 people went to see 'O corpo aberto' in Galicia, quite a feat considering the context: last week almost fifteen productions premiered, such as the award-winning 'Mantícora', by Carlos Vermut, and the second film of the year by director Santiago Mitre, director of 'Argentina 1985', 'Little Flower'. "Premiering now was an odyssey," the director declared now, already relieved, but the reception is "being very good" in Galicia.
Going back to the adaptation of Ferrín's work, what the scriptwriters did was “bring the teacher's story to an end”, which was not fully concluded in the book. "We complete with new characters and concluding plots that were unfinished" to make the film round.
The environment, in addition, played has known favor. And also the culture of Galicia. “We have —says the director, who has been living in the Community for two decades now— a very rich spiritual cultural tradition, and above all we have a very interesting culture of death“ that leaves a lot of space for artistic creation. “That coexistence between the living and the dead is very present in our culture and has a very interesting aesthetic and narrative component. And social level I think healer«. During the casting sessions to choose the child actors, the director tried to be careful so that the parents auditioned the plot of the film to perfection, with all the gloominess of it. She asked them if they would have any qualms about their children acting in a movie of this type, and to her surprise, one of the mothers blurted out, “It's okay! If I spoke to my father after he died." The answer caught Huertas totally careless, and the woman had explained to him that she, precisely, had been through an 'open body': people who claim to be mediators between the living and the dead.
From the borders to the west
It has been said that it is a horror film, scary, drama, mystery... But the director does not pigeonhole 'O corpo aberto' in any of those genres: it is a frontier film. Not only geographically, since this village is a few kilometers from Portugal, but also linguistically (Spanish, Galician and Portuguese are spoken) and also between the "masculine and feminine". Of course, the most important border: the one that stops the living and the dead, a border that is becoming increasingly blurred. "The village is a kind of limbo, there is no cut."
Western is a word that comes up frequently when talking about this movie. Although the time is a little later than the one set in the great films of the golden age of Hollywood, they do have some similarities: of course, the figure of the stranger who arrives in a hostile town. Like James Stewart in 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance'. But Huerta distances himself from the gunslinger genre, and although he acknowledges that, obviously, he has it marked “in his retina”, other films such as 'La noche del cazador' will have a more direct influence. The darkness, mystery, "unknown territory" and the groundbreaking photography by Stanley Cortez of Charles Laughton's masterpiece served the director as "reference".
With the film released in the heat of the movie theater, Huerta looks back on a hard shoot: "They always say that you have to avoid outdoors —especially in Galicia—, Animals and children, and we have had all three", to laugh. But "a professional team like mine ends up being incorporated into the shoot". The Galician landscapes, although "it sounds like a cliché", contributed to the film "a lot of natural beauty and diversity of landscapes". Regarding the work of Tamar Novas (many say that it is the best role of her career), the director cannot be praised enough. “You are a loving, intelligent, hard-working guy… We were in contact for years. I would repeat a thousand times with him ».
