GUADALAJARA, Jal.- Ludwika Paleta and her son Nicolás Haza star in the fiction film “After”, directed by Sofía Gómez Córdova, where the mother and son relationship is great, but when the young descendant in the plot dies, she begins to give He says he didn’t know him well enough.
The story competed for the Mezcal, Maguey and Hecho en Jalisco awards at the 39th edition of the Guadalajara International Film Festival. Adriana Palafox, Luis Velázquez, Alan Oliva and Darío Rocas also perform.
Gómez Córdova (Aguascalientes, 1983), co-writer of “Somos Mari Pepa” and “Los lobos” by Samuel Kishi, talks in an interview that the original idea of the story is Luis Briones.
“He is the scriptwriter with whom I worked on my first film ‘The Blue Years’ and on ‘The Wolves’. The story arose from the concern of portraying a character who loses a loved one, but it was very different from how I knew him. That is, someone knows a person and this person in turn is known differently by other people.
All facets are equally true, which is why they become a mystery when there is no longer the possibility of continuing to know that part of the loved one who has already passed away. That is a mourning beyond the fact that you miss someone, that I will never be able to know more about that person, who like everyone else was a sea of complexities and contradictions,” says Córdova.
In “After” (Mexico, 2024), Carmen is seen who, faced with the incomprehensible death of her only son, Jorge, discovers that the relationship of deep friendship that they had developed after abandoning her father, kept secrets. None of them answers the mystery behind her, what could have been a suicide, but they draw a contradictory portrait that forces her to face her own blurred reflection of her.
Then other topics arose to be examined by the director:
“I wanted to explore the topic of motherhood and the decisions around motherhood and identity, as well as loss. Here the mother feels a kind of betrayal when she realizes that she did not know many things about her son even though they were her best friends. Her mother put aside her musical career and her love for music to be a mother, and her son did know how that affected him. She wanted to address the decisions that motherhood entails. “I think they are concerns that all women have, even if they want not to have children.”
–How did you choose Ludwika Paleta and Nicolas Haza, your son in real life, to work together?
–Ludwika was in the role from very early on. We were barely writing the script when I met her at a workshop we did together in 2019, and I told her that it would be cool if Nicolás was the other character, but he was younger and living in Canada, studying film, and there was no more talk. . A couple of years later we started working on the project and it became a serious question if Nicolás wanted to act. He had already returned to live in Mexico and was becoming interested in acting, and Ludwika asked me if it seemed appropriate for him to act, and I said yes. I asked him to ask him and he accepted the role.
“I spoke with Nicolás on the phone and I liked him very much. He is a very cute boy. He seemed super transparent and sensible to me, and something in me told me that this was obviously going to work. At that time he did not have acting experience, but he had studied film and was very familiar with filming, and over the course of the months, we began to generate work dynamics and he had other projects to act in, and he arrived with me already with a little more experience. The truth is that it was very nice to work with both of them, I enjoyed them a lot.”
–It is always said that mothers know their children very well, but here it is the opposite, what can you say about that?
–We were interested in investigating how the people closest to this young character, particularly the mother, in addition to facing the pain of his death, had the feeling of not being able to know him more and that others knew other aspects of his private life and her. No, which calls into question the bond of trust that she had with him, and in the midst of grief she also has to deal with that feeling and also anger.
“One of the driving forces that I felt when we were working on the script and that arose a lot in those moments was anger. There is enormous sadness and pain, but there is also a lot of anger, as a stupid child, how could you do that stupid thing of, perhaps, committing suicide, why did you kill yourself? And why didn’t you ask me for help if you felt bad?
–Unlike your previous film, what was more complicated for you here?
–The previous film that I directed, I’m not saying that it was easy, but everything has to be put into its dimensions, it is a film that happened in a single location, this feature film was made in two different cities. Also, the beach had transfers. We creatives were even scattered around the world, the pandemic came, but we managed to make the film.
“We signed it in five weeks and the reality is that it was for longer, due to all the transfers it involved. There was a time restriction in every sense to comply with the work plan, and we had to be very flexible. I would love to have this scene in a beautiful sequential shot, but I didn’t have more time to do it. “I would love to shoot a movie where I could plan everything and have all the time in the world.”
And he concludes: “Outside of all that, all the learning, obviously most of it, is very positive. It was a wonderful experience”.
