Ainhoa Rodríguez's Destello bravío is showing exclusively on MUBI in most countries starting September 14, 2022, in the series Debuts.
I approached the development of Destello bravío by going back to my origins, working from the place where I come from and where my paternal family comes from, the region of Tierra de Barros in Extremadura. I went to live in a small town in the area for nine months to be part of the community and do my field work and build the script from meetings, castings, rehearsals, and locations, with a cast of natural actresses that could have been my grandmothers, aunts, or cousins. And that activity that mixes film creation with the ointments of authorial roots is done instinctively, in a search that is full of enigmas. We do not know why that territory, that journey, those people, that orography or that idiosyncrasy makes so much sense to us, but it does because it attracts us deeply, and that is a complete mystery, the mystery of the place to which one believes they belong. Being also a culture deeply rooted in the Catholic tradition, the mystery of artistic creation is related to “the mysteries of faith.” And it is precisely these mysteries that Destello bravío addresses: death, life, identity, and the symbols we create to understand them.
All the time, I was wondering why the community wanted to be part of the film; why its villagers participated with absolute dedication, commitment, and generosity; opening their homes, their secrets, their lives. As the months went by, I realized that everyone wanted the possibility of transcendence, of being recorded for posterity in a film. And for a town in the process of depopulation, a town that is fading in time, this seemed like a beautiful poem of resistance: cinema as a place of identity and immortality. Also, it was a contradiction according to their beliefs of Judeo-Christian eternity after death. But it is a fascinating contradiction that shows that art, like life, is composed of contradictions: contradiction as the very source of life. And in this film, Catholic, secular, and esoteric beliefs are strongly combined, which, a priori, seem to oppose each other, but actually coexist in a natural way as the very magma of this cinematographic work.
The film speaks of dreams and repressed desires that remain hidden, yet they possess a transforming, luminous force, a force underground like the lava of a volcano about to erupt. And it is the women of this decaying town who are the main possessors of this powerful force that dwells in their hidden fantasies. Women of a mature age, non-canonical withered bodies, very vivid faces whom the industrial cinema does not give a place, instead making them invisible. This industrial cinema also conceals their accents, their aging town, their homes, and their customs. Their mere presence—in addition to the hidden forces of their repressed desires and fantasies—is an exercise in transgression.
The film travels through a mortally wounded village, populated mainly by old people who will gradually die and leave it behind. This is a dwindling village facing a physical death (the disappearance of its people at the end of their lives), but also a metaphorical one (the end of a traditional way of life before the arrival of a completely globalized, ultra-capitalist world). “A mighty, mighty flash is going to happen, and everything is going to change,” Isa prays to her tape recorder. And before this happens, before everything changes, before we become, as Borges’s poem says, "dust the dust" and disappear into infinity, we must leave a record of ourselves. Let us make cinema: cinema of origins, cinema of identity and resistance, feminist cinema. Let us make cinema for eternity.