Spanish director Alcalde’s documentary “La Sagrada Familia” captivates the city of Edinburgh

William Garrido

Edinburgh (UK) AUGUST 20 (EFE) Spanish filmmaker Borja Alcalde is making the premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) the documentary La Sagrada Familia, which focuses on a family of Peruvian shamans who go against his beliefs, as he sets out on a journey To the Amazon to find its balance in the whirlpool of globalization.

On a rural truck, a large family of shamans drives from their home in Tarapoto (Peru) to the sacred Amazon, tired of “communicating with each other” techniques, as the Glasgow (Scotland)-based filmmaker explains in an interview with Evie.).

“La Sagrada Familia” is a documentary, an intimate window showing a “completely different and at the same time very similar theoretical world”, reflecting its first film Alcalde, which premiered Thursday at the EIFF in Edinburgh to a huge public applause.

“We are not that different. That’s what I wanted to show here,” says the Basque filmmaker, who believes that “globalization enters every home, wherever you are, ‘whether it be appreciated’, in the high mountains of Peru or a suburban neighborhood.” Madrid”.

The three children of parents Sergio and Carmen, the shamanic couple, are addicted to “Fornite, another on smartphone; the whole family with Netflix and Facebook,” describes the director, who made his big screen debut with this movie.

The clash of generations evokes in parents the desire to connect with nature on a journey – with the essence of “Little Miss Sunshine” (2006) flavored with huacatay, tamales and ayahuasca – across plains, cliffs, and Peruvian reserves to the Sacred Valley of the Incas.

Alcalde describes them as “five very colorful people in a very small space,” “a little bit of everything happens to them (…), there is something for everyone.”

The director asserts that the documentary will provoke audiences’ “trips (…) with our families and friends and memories of some moments”, or will prompt them to “take another trip”.

long project

Before the premiere, he recalls that five years of work had passed and during that time, the film “changed”, just like him and the main characters, he says.

Initially, the documentary focused on “the abuse of ancestral plants,” Alcalde explains, referring to the fact that “there is shamanic tourism.”

More and more people from the West are traveling to Peru and the surrounding areas to experience the celebrations of shamanic ceremonies and their medicinal plants, such as ayahuasca, for which they can pay between $1,500 and $2,000 (between 1,400 and 1990 euros).

One of the few available studies, “Ayahuasca, Iquitos and Monster Veraz”, conducted by Carlos Suarez Alvarez in 2019, indicates that this activity generates $6.5 million annually (€6.47 million).

During cohabitation with the film’s protagonists, “the family unit that binds them, the relationship” gained weight and the documentary became about “family, technology and nature,” says the director.

“Technology is absorbing us,” Mayor says, warning that without “correct use,” it “affects us in every area of ​​our person,” particularly in “interpersonal relationships” and with the family.

A family, as a concept, for the mayor an “unfinished project”, such as Antonio Gaudi’s cathedral in Barcelona, ​​La Sagrada Familia.

“Family is something that is always growing, always changing,” the director reflects, thus establishing an analogy between the godly construction, “which seems to never end,” with the concept of the family.

Alcalde invites us to think about his documentary about “there are different interpretations (…) of what the family is,” and “the search for a definition requires breaking down the structures we have and creating others.” EFE

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