Filmmaker Adrián Orr first met Sara Toledo during rehearsals of the Spanish theatre company La Tristura. She was a young woman from a working-class suburb of Madrid. Celso Giménez, one of the directors of the company, had invited him to watch the actors as they were thinking about working together on a movie project.
Orr eventually decided to make Sara the central character in To Our Friends (which had its world premiere this week in the International Competition at Visions Du Réel). The film combines documentary and dramatic elements. It depicts its young protagonist at a pivotal moment in her life. She likes “raising hell” with her best pal Pedro, having fun and getting into scrapes on the streets, but she is also intrigued by the lives of her new friends who work in theatre.
“When we started shooting, she [Sara] was 17 and when we finished, she was 21,” Orr recalls. The director talks of her “strong character and her energy.”
Sara was studying for exams to get into university. Orr realised that she undergoing experiences similar to his own when he left home to study film in Lisbon. “She was super curious about cinema, theatre, literature – everything,” he says of her hunger for knowledge. “I felt it was an important moment in her life when she was changing and having to decide a lot of things.”
The decisions Sara made now were going to determine her future. It was inevitable that she was going to have to leave some of her old friends behind.
Orr himself did the cinematography. He films his characters’ lives from the inside, capturing their most intimate moments.
To Our Friends was scripted – but only to a limited extent. “There are a mixture of scenes – scenes that are not scripted at all and others that are scripted like a fiction film,” Orr explains. He talks of using “a lie to create a bigger truth.” In the film, Sara is working on a play which reflects elements in her own life.
“I always try to avoid that conflict between documentary and fiction. I don’t care too much which genre I am shooting,” the director continues. His aim is simply to “get as close as possible” to his characters and experiences using every technique at his disposal.
The filmmakers came up with ideas and settings, for example an important scene set in a swimming pool, but they also allowed their characters to behave spontaneously. The camera became “like another friend hanging out together [with them].”
When the friends are brought together, for example at a wedding scene at the end of the film, and they start talking, drinking and smoking together, they soon forget that the camera is there. “It’s like real conversation.”
Orr had used a similar technique on his earlier film, Niñato (2017), about a young man obsessed with music and hip-hop but who also faces the responsibility of raising his three kids.
The director jokes that sometimes during shooting of To Our Friends, Sara felt the movie was “in advance of her own life.” The filmmakers had already anticipated what was going to happen to her. “Sometimes, it [the film] was more fiction than real but at other times, the fiction became real after a few years.”
To Our Friends was made through New Folder (the outfit behind Orr’s previous films), El Viaje Films and Karõ Filmes.
Producer Hugo Herrera is one of Orr’s best friends. “We were in school together. We studied together, we lived together for 15 years,” he says of one of his key collaborators. Both he and Herrera had lives similar to those of Sara and Pedro in the film. They too came from a close-knit neighbourhood and had to leave old friends behind to pursue their artistic ambitions.
Marina Albert and João Salaviza are the main producers at El Viaje Films. Orr praises them as “among the most interesting producers in Spain,” working within the mainstream industry and yet being “super free, ready to experiment and to explore film language.”
Portuguese partner Karo Filmes is run by João Salaviza and Renée Nader Messora. “They are very close friends of mine,” Orr says of them.
The director deliberately kept the crew small. That way, he knew he could move quickly and repeat scenes if necessary. “The editing was more like with a normal film but the way we shot was super random.”
Orr is an experienced assistant director and knows just how to organise a film shoot. He didn’t want a “heavy” schedule but always tried to arrange production so the participants were energised and able to enjoy what they were doing. “If we don’t get it today, let’s try it tomorrow but I am not going to force the situation,” Orr sums up his production philosophy.
Following the Nyon premiere, the film is set to screen at festivals in Spain, Portugal, Mexico and beyond. “Let’s see what happens! I think the people who watched the film enjoyed it and understand what we are talking about,” the director suggests.
The director is already turning his attention toward new projects. “I don’t make a difference between documentary and fiction but I focus on real things, real characters…I have a few ideas to work with.”
On the next film, he’ll be looking to use a Director of Photography rather than to shoot it all himself. He may also work on a more tightly scripted basis. “I feel like I want to do a bigger film with a bigger budget but, at the same time, I want to keep my freedom…”
