DIRECTOR

MERITXELL COLELL

Director and scriptwriter

Meritxell Colell is regarded as one of a new generation of talented Spanish filmmakers. In 2015 she was selected by The Cinéfondation to participate in Cannes’ L’Atelier to develop Facing the Wind. She has edited eight feature films hat have been selected at Thessaloniki Film Festival, IDFA Amsterdam, Festival Internacional de Cine de Mar del Plata, DocumentaMadrid, Ventana Sur and Al Jazeera International Documentary Film Festival. Since 2007, she combines teaching cinema with her work as a filmmaker. Currently she is preparing a new feature film as director: DÚO, recently selected for MIA Cinema Co-production Market in Rome.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

Facing the Wind is a fiction movie with a documentary approach. It is a story based on real emotions, both the protagonists’ and my own. It is a personal story. My grandfather died in 2005 and later that year I went to live in Buenos Aires. When I came back after two years living there, I needed to make a portrait of my grandmother and her village, a village that is about to disappear.

As both a filmmaker and a spectator, I esteem films that one feels, and that make one feel things, that get under your skin and burrow into you. That leave something inside you that keeps you thinking. They are films that live with you.

I am interested in cinema that allows you to inhabit a reality, to live it. I am interested in honest, intimate stories that are simple and genuine. There is something about them that moves you deeply and transforms you. It makes you look for the right images, the exact gesture, the essence of the story. That is what, in my opinion, makes cinema so complex and beautiful. When this happens, a movie can be infinite.