Daydreaming So Vividly About Our Spanish Holidays is now showing exclusively on MUBI in the series Here Comes the Sun: Summer on Film.
I had the desire to write a fairy tale based on the rituals of adolescence and its deeply transformative moments, delving into the euphoric highs and the profound lows; a tale about abandon and escapism through the lens of magic realism.
In recent summers, it’s become a viral practice for European young people to jump off their hotel balconies while on holidays in Spain, and to even record it with their phones to post the footage online later. I found, in this practice, a way to channel my obsession with how there are things in front of our eyes that could potentially be magical and have a spiritual depth, yet which we are unable to understand. It’s tragic to see young people play with death like that; then again, these are times where we feel things so intensely (sometimes without even understanding what we’re feeling) that it leads us into acting in extreme and mysterious ways, without ever thinking about the physical harm.
Witnessing it from a local point of view, throughout the years we’ve seen the national TV and media portray and explore this phenomenon with a cold and distant regard; however, I often found myself fantasizing and bonding with the young foreigners, thinking about our common links and mirroring such an aggressive activity with my own latent teenage angst, which is so tied to our generation, the internet, and a deep longing to feel understood and to belong.
I wanted to look back and incorporate some of the symbols that were important to me as a depressed teen who spent most of his time on the computer. Back then I had quite a fixation with Junji Itō’s Uzumaki, and that’s why spirals are somewhat present in the film. Here, it helped me represent this luring of the characters into the sun’s light and warmth, its life and its magic. The almost hypnotic power of attraction and the hold it has on them, like a magnetic influence. It’s their purpose to reach it and get as close to it as they possibly can. From a viewer’s perspective, we can perceive this as something dangerous, seeing mostly the harm it will cause to their bodies, but they willingly accept to go wherever it wants to take them. They crave to let it into their system beyond their physical form. It’s an irrational desire.
I dug through old social media entries and personal diaries through phone notes in order to build the voice-over that articulates the narrative. There was a lot of nostalgia upon which I could draw for the main characters and their point of view about this summer period. I focused on empathizing with the emotions that go through one’s first unsupervised journey and the surreal feeling of experimentation within a radically different climate than the one you’re used to. Being somewhere where you’re allowed to be someone else and, maybe for the first time, yourself.
We strived to capture reality through an eerie and spectral lens. So many of our visual references came from YouTube videos, media from the press, some actual, and very raw, footage of Mallorca. While we wanted to pursue the preexisting essence of the location, we also wanted to build a dreamlike feel to it in order to reach this fairy tale dimension. One that would allow us to see the island not anymore as a holiday destination, but as a sacred place of pilgrimage.