Daydream Nation: Luis López Carrasco on "The Year of the Discovery"

Luis López Carrasco discusses his latest film, a split-screen look at Spain in 1992 explored via the economic crisis of 2008.
Jordan Cronk

After decades of perceived underdevelopment, Spain reintroduced itself to the world in 1992. During the spring and summer of that year, the country hosted both the Expo ‘92 world’s fair in Seville and the Olympics Games in Barcelona. But against this celebratory backdrop, turmoil seethed as thousands of workers protested the economic measures that threatened the local industrial sector, eventually resulting in the razing of the parliament building in Cartagena—incidents all but forgotten in light of the day’s more publicized events.

In The Year of the Discovery, director Luis López Carrasco looks back on the events of 1992 through the lens of the 2008 recession that crippled Spain’s economy. A kind of staged documentary set in a real-life bar in Cartagena, the film—co-written by Raul Liarte and shot by Carrasco on period appropriate Hi8 video—recreates the era through a combination of interviews and conversations with and amongst locals whose memories of 1992 echo forth to the present day. For much of the film’s 200 minute runtime, Carrasco alternates archival footage with extended bar scenes presented in split-screen, where the patrons’ conversations are seen and heard from a variety of angles. While unionists and protesters share their remembrances, younger people speak of similar struggles, blurring the line between time periods and creating a literal dialogue between past and present political issues. Just as he did in the earlier El Futuro (2013) and Aliens (2017), films that dealt alternately with the art and politics of youth culture in 1980s Spain, Carrasco has, with The Year of the Discovery, brought a forgotten moment in Spanish history into the harsh light of modernity, suggesting that in order to change the future, we must first come to terms with our past.

Following The Year of the Discovery’s premiere in Rotterdam, Carrasco and I sat down to discuss his own memories of the period, the film’s casting and complex editing process, and how Spanish viewers have reacted to the events recreated in the film. The Year of the Discovery screens virtually at the New York Film Festival from October 7-12.


NOTEBOOK: Seeing as the film is in large part about memory, I was wondering if you could start by discussing your conception of this early-‘90s period as you experienced it versus how you see it now, and if it’s changed at all over time?

LUIS LÓPEZ CARRASCO: Yes, absolutely. In 1992, I remember being very excited; it was like a poor member of a family being invited somewhere by their wealthy relatives—you want to make a good impression! It was one of the only times in Spanish history when the population was confident and united about something. Everyone knew the Olympic Games were going to be in Seville—it was announced in 1986—so there was almost six years of anticipation and excitement, but also concern. Everybody was worried and nervous; no one wanted to do it wrong, or make a bad impression. We wanted to show the world that we weren’t an underdeveloped country anymore.

At the same time there was a kind of cultural hangover, it was a time of economic crises with a lot of unemployment. It felt like the first day of January after a really fun party, but instead of feeling good you’re feeling depressed. So, while I remember feeling that Spain was going to be a real economic power, I also remember watching the parliament building burn on TV. That was always a mystery to me. I didn’t understand what had happened there. But twenty years later, after the economic crisis of 2008, the national parliament was still having to be protected by fences because of protestors. It was then that I remembered that strange image from my childhood. But when I asked my family what had happened back in 1992, nobody remembered. I do have one uncle who still lives in Cartagena, and he and the people from that town remember, but nobody else does. So that was the motivation: to investigate not only what happened, but why everybody forgot. Now, having made the film, I don’t think people forgot; I think most people weren’t paying attention. I think most people believed it was just another workers’ problem. And I think that speaks to the idea that everyone was focused on one thing: making the Olympic Games successful. It was like they were saying, “We don’t want to hear anything. We don’t want to be worried about anything else.”

NOTEBOOK: How and when did you begin to conceptualize the film as a kind of hybrid between documentary and fiction, with real people participating in conversations taken from actual stories and testimonies? 

CARRASCO: The process began four or five years ago. I really wanted to go back to the period of time depicted in El Futuro. I had a feeling I needed to make a second film about this era, because in the end El Futuro was like a game, showing the ‘80s as a celebration of the middle class, which is one way of thinking back on the decade. But a lot of social groups have disappeared from movies and media and they’ve disappeared not because they became middle class, but because no one cared—mainstream literature and film stopped paying attention. In the ‘70s there were a lot of pluralistic approaches to portraying different social groups in movies. But in the 1980s the documentary, for example, disappeared from Spanish production. Industrialization affects millions of people in many professions all across Spain.

I made El Futuro with a kind of documentary approach, because I was filming a real party and the people were actually drunk. But at the same time I was inserting my own fictions, and for this film I wanted to work in the same way. Like El Futuro, it would be a period film shot in an enclosed space, utilizing fiction but also workers’ stories about the current times, only portrayed in an environment that looks like 1992.

My co-screenwriter Raul Liarte and I had to do a lot of interviews with people from the era because there’s not much information in the media about these events. When we initially interviewed these people it was just as a source of information, but as we got to know them, their stories and their faces and their sadness and their anger was so alive that I felt they had to be part of the film. They didn’t have to be just a source of information. In this regard we held up the works of Peter Watkins and Frederick Wiseman as inspirations for what we wanted to achieve. We knew the film would land somewhere between the two of them, but as we were making it we never knew if it was moving closer to Watkins or to Wiseman. 

When we started to do open casting calls in working class neighbors, getting to know current workers and current unemployed people, Raul and I began to feel that all the fictional scenarios that we had come up with were less interesting than the things these people could bring to the film. For me, film is the gathering of people in a space under certain conditions that I create, but also a way for me to make connections between people who don’t know each other, to make the unexpected happen, to make something that my imagination couldn’t create on its own.

We actually shot eight fictional sequences, and they were really good, but after meeting all these people we decided not to include them. There is only one wholly fictional moment in the film, when the drunk guy is speaking to himself—that’s a monologue we adapted from a novel from the early 1920s. I think meeting these anonymous people convinced us that they had to be the main aspect of the film. That said, they’re all costumed, with their hair styled to look like both 1992 and the present day. I asked the costume department to dress the characters in a way that they could fit into both time periods; the idea was for it to be ambiguous, so the viewer doesn’t know quite what period they’re watching. 

NOTEBOOK: Was this anachronistic approach something you had conceptualized from the beginning, or did it evolve through the writing process?

CARRASCO: The idea was to use a home movie aesthetic, but at the same time it’s not really a home movie aesthetic because of the way the camera moves and also because you don’t see the actors waving at or acknowledging the camera. So in that sense it’s more like a tricky documentary that looks like something that could have been shot in the ‘90s. I decided to use a Hi8 camera so I could approach the texture of that era.

When we were selecting stories during the audition process, we were selecting moments in which these people were speaking and behaving in a similar way as they would have in 1992. This was a central aspect of the film’s conception. We are working with current people who have been through a crisis, but their faces, behavior, and stories connect through their gestures and emotions to a former crisis. When at one point in the film the young girl says that her father had a lot of problems and that their family lost everything because of the crisis, you don’t know if she’s talking about the 1992 crisis or the 2008 crisis. The film is a connection between two crises: the voices and the faces are of the same social class that suffered through each crisis. This device allowed me to connect two time periods.

NOTEBOOK: How did you go about facilitating the conversations we see in the film? Did you find yourself approaching your dialogues with the younger participants differently than the older people, most of whom probably have pretty vivid memories of the earlier period?

CARRASCO: We met most everyone through interviews or out in the streets—for example the woman who works in metal, which is not very common for a female in this area. We conversed with these people and asked them questions. And then during the shooting we would ask more questions, or we would repeat the same questions and have them retell their answers. But we didn’t write any fictional stories for them to tell, other than ones that were in our original scenario that we didn’t end up using. So sometimes the people would be talking to us off camera, and other times they’d be speaking amongst each other. One of the most complex things was figuring out who had to speak to who to best express their feelings and emotions.

We approached the older performers in the same way, not only asking them to tell us their memories of 1992, but also about how their neighborhoods have changed and how they lived—personal aspects of their lives. This idea of mixing all the characters and approaching them the same way was important. We didn’t differentiate between them.

That said, there were certain topics we wanted to cover and certain people we wanted to mix together. There was this space that we had control over and this Hi8 device that was very small and very unassuming. I don’t like my locations or sets to look like a place where people are shooting a movie. There are no lamps, no wires; there’s only a sound recordist. And sometimes I asked the sound recordist to leave the microphone on a tripod, because I wanted the performers to forget that they were acting. I kept the cameras far away from the actors and had them sit naturally around the tables. Sometimes we would even bring in outside people to sit at the tables to make them feel like the bar was open. And of course we were all smoking!

In general, I would speak to the actors for a while and then leave them completely alone to make conversation. We kept the monitors far away from everyone, so I would sit and follow the conversations on the monitors from afar. And when I felt a certain conversation was over, I could relay a message to Raul at the bar (he plays the bartender) to have the actors change topics. But sometimes the conversations would be so intense and involved that we had to stop the shooting because the actors were going to hit each other! You can see that almost happen in one of the last sequences in the second part of the film, where the performers start to really argue with each other. Of course, it’s a bar, so there’s alcohol, and because of this and the way we were shooting they started to forget about the movie. Some of these conversations were shot in 2-3 hour takes. So we had the privilege of time to work with the actors, to give them the time to explain what they wanted to explain. But sometimes people got carried away. [Laughs]

NOTEBOOK: What can you tell me about the bar? It’s a real bar, but it’s no longer open, correct?

CARRASCO: It was open for a bit when we first started to shoot, but it shut down before we finished the film. I think it closed two weeks into our shoot. Some of the early shots in the film of people eating breakfast were shot when it was still open. For example, the conversation with the old woman who talks about her eye problem is a real conversation from when the bar was open. The original idea was to mix the crowd from the actual bar with our actors.

The bar opened in 1941 and was remodeled in 1980. I spent several weeks over a period of a few years in Cartagena doing research, and while I was there I discovered this bar. I started going there to have breakfast. What was interesting to me was that the bar looked like it hadn’t been updated since 1992. They actually had the results of the Barcelona football team from 1991, 1992, and 1993 hanging on the wall! 

NOTEBOOK: So I guess you didn’t have to do much set dressing?

CARRASCO: Very, very little! While I was there I saw no one using cell phones, and they all dressed in these sport suits and shirts like it was the ‘90s. It was strange; it felt like we were putting a camera somewhere where there hadn’t been a camera in 100 years, and where there wouldn’t be a camera ever again. 

NOTEBOOK: You mentioned the immense amount of footage you shot. Did this dictate the length of the film? And did this at all influence the idea to utilize split-screen?

CARRASCO: Originally I thought the film would last 4-5 hours. We ended up taking out one chapter. In fact, the Fred Wiseman and Peter Watkins influences I mentioned earlier had a lot to do with the length of their films. Also, some of the Spanish documentaries from ‘70s are collective portraits that would last 3-4 hours. There are 45 characters in the film, so even if you give each one just five minutes of screen time, it’s going to be a long film!

I knew that the film would be set in one space and center on faces and voices—so I would only be shooting close-ups. Some of the collective moments during the audition process were shot with two cameras, and at one point by chance my assistant editor put two monitors together so we could look at the footage. From the very first day of shooting we decided to explore the possibility of split-screen. We edited the same sequences on one screen and two screens and from there started to consider what we were gaining and what we were losing by using split-screen. One of the reasons I was interested in this technique was because a lot of the film came to me while I was eating breakfast at this bar, listening to multiple conversations at once. With split-screen I had the feeling that the space could expand. Having several points of view occurring simultaneously allows for an immersive experience. We didn’t want to use many jump cuts; this way of working with time was another objective.

NOTEBOOK: Can you talk more about the editing process and how you negotiated the two-screen presentation?

CARRASCO: The editing was very complex. For much of the film’s first hour, the split-screens are supposed to be occurring in synchronicity, but this had to be built through the editing. We had to look for associations and connections in the footage, like the smoke of a cigarette that can travel from one screen to the other. Honestly I get a little sick thinking about how complex it was. [Laughs]

Luckily, at one point I had an idea: that at the moment when a character recounts a dream, that the screen would switch to the center of the frame. I think these were moments, especially after so much time in split-screen, that we could show a character alone with their thoughts. The split-screen includes the ambience of the bar and connects every person to the collective; in the second half you can see and feel this idea of collective experience by how the split-screen shows the people interacting and looking at each other. In the first half you watch a lot of the characters in silence, on one half of the screen, as something else transpires on the other screen. And then in the second half you see and hear these same sequences with sound, on the opposite screen, and you hear them speaking about the present day. This was a way for us to signify the meaning and feeling of the shots by placing them against another image. 

NOTEBOOK: Can you tell me a bit about the archival footage used in the film? At the beginning it’s almost like watching a news broadcast from the era because you’re using so much vintage TV footage.

CARRASCO: I got the rights to use the commercials very early in the process. There are several archives in Spain where I found old commercials of the Expo and the Olympic Games. Some of the unionists from the era also gave me DVDs and VHS tapes with lots of footage, most of which belonged to the local television stations. This is where all the riot footage came from. But we used this material in a variety of ways. For example, when the woman is preparing all the snacks and you hear the radio broadcast about the protests, that’s actually audio from these local television news reports. There is one thing I wrote: the radio broadcast you hear while the characters are eating lunch; it's based on news from that same week. It was important for me to reiterate that the week that the parliament was burned was also the same week that the Maastricht Treaty of the European Union was signed. I looked for actual broadcast news of these events, but I couldn’t find anything that dealt with it directly. 

NOTEBOOK: Do you remember any of these commercials from your childhood?

CARRASCO: I remember the Expo one. I’m not sure I remember the Olympic ones, because in that era all the commercials had this Michael Bay appearance with all these helicopters and explosions, which I feel like I would’ve remembered. [Laughs]

NOTEBOOK: Obviously this is the first time the film’s being seen publicly, but what’s the feedback been like from the people who you’ve shown it to? Have any Spanish people shared their feelings with you?

CARRASCO: Spanish people who have seen the film tell me that it’s destroyed them, emotionally, personally, and family-wise. There are some people who’ve told me that they couldn’t watch another movie after this one because they needed time to recompose. A friend told me after one of the first screenings that he initially felt sadness, and then anger, and then shame—not shame in the sense of feeling responsible, but in the sense of people having to deal with their memories and why they don’t remember this story.

Feedback from programmers has been really, really good so far as well, and in a way that I’ve never experienced before. Programmers from many different festivals in many different countries have said to me that it’s important for them to show the film because of how contentious it’s been in certain places like Brazil, Ecuador, Barcelona, and France in terms of social conflicts. I think in that sense the response has been more personal for people than it has been for my previous films, which were in some ways perhaps more radical. Those films have a strong formal idea, but for this one I decided to maintain some formal aspects while at the same time not imposing a bigger structure on the characters. I was worried how it would go over because of just how exhausting it’s been to bring it to fruition—even to translate and subtitle the film. I wasn’t sure it was even going to work. But based on the response so far I think it is working.

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