The film that could not be made and that was made: “Forgetting that we will be”, the Colombian film in search of the Goya Prize

“This movie can’t be made, it just can’t be made.” Fernando Trueba, winner of the Oscar for best film in a language other than English for Belle Epoque and with nearly a dozen Goya Awards in his library, he’s one of Spain’s most respected filmmakers. It was in him that the Colombian writer thought Hector Abad Faciolince when, finally, he accepted the proposal of Gonzalo cordoba, who as a producer insisted for years on making a film based on his book “Forgetting that we will be”, but the Spanish director refused to move the project forward.

Héctor Abad Gómez was a doctor and university professor recognized for his unwavering fight for the defense of human rights, assassinated in Medellín on August 25, 1987. Twenty years later, the writer decided to exorcise the pain of his father’s death in a text that celebrates the life of the man for whom he was ready to go to hell.

“The book begins with a boy who says he is not going to pray anymore because he wants to go to hell. They told him that his father was going there and that he wanted to accompany him ”. Héctor Abad’s eyes are still wet with memories, as in this interview with Infobae. “The passage of time is strange,” he said to himself. Things change a lot, they change in intensity, clarity, sharpness. I don’t believe in the afterlife, but I would say my father is still there; the mind is magical and tends to have magical thoughts; So when I see the fireflies in the field, I think he’s there, in the fireflies ”.

This intimate connection between the author and his story was one of the reasons that led Trueba to reject the offer made to him. “It’s different if you adapt a fiction – explains the Spanish director. But it is the subjective truth of a person who recounts the memories he has of his father, the affection he gave him, the affection, the stories, it is his reality, his memory, things he knows and has lived, and the movies, all, are lies, it’s Marlon Brando in a bathrobe saying he’s Marco Antonio“. The other two justifications for his refusal, he said, were that the story went on for too many years (“In the novel, you can tell the life of a character, but in the movies it’s very difficult”) and , well, “my cowardice, for it was a very good book, and to face a very good book is to get into trouble, to look for unnecessary problems”.

Despite the refusal, Gonzalo Córdoba met Trueba in Madrid and suggested that he read the text again, to give the film a chance. “And I reread it, and my wife reread it, and when we finished we said ‘Can’t you ‘, but after that I started to think, man, if we focus this, if we try this over here, if we just limit ourselves to this and that and say it this way, maybe this way, it could be, ” he tells this medium.

Writer, journalist and screenwriter David Trueba (Goya Award for best screenplay adapted for his version of Salamis soldiers), Fernando’s brother, was responsible for rewriting history. The text stayed a while in Héctor Abad’s mailbox. “I didn’t dare to open it. I was very afraid of not liking him ”. For days (which Abad felt like months) the screenplay went unread, while producer Gonzalo Córdoba called day to day to hear the Antioquia writer’s opinion. “I finally read it and it struck me as amazing how many elements of the book were placed in a different order. It was all there“.

The film started shooting in Medellín at the beginning of the previous year. “I had shoots where I suffered, where I cried and some, like this one, where I was very happy. It was wonderful – Trueba remembers now. I have the feeling that I made a lot of friends in Colombia with this film, and one of the greatest is Héctor, I hope it will be forever ”.

Abad Faciolince, for his part, decided to move away as far as possible. He went to Italy “so as not to be in the way, he didn’t want to be an interrupting look or someone saying how things should be done”. However, his wife fell ill, an operation was scheduled, and the writer had to return. “I am very grateful to my wife who fell ill, because being already there, I could not stop, it was very nice to see the shoot and to see him work, she is not a dictatorial director, authoritarian, he is elegant, devoted, gentle, loving, a director like my father wanted everyone to be ”.

At the end of 2019, Héctor Abad Faciolince once again faced the image of his father, this time on a screen. It was an unfinished version, lacking music and a few tweaks. He remembers it like this: “I don’t really know if I really saw him. It’s not that I cried, my tears were falling, then I saw her through a curtain of tears. As if I hadn’t felt anything or felt so much that I was completely overwhelmed. “

Last year he saw him again, at a private screening that Trueba did for the family. Finished, with the wonderful music of Polish Zbigniew Preisner (the same who composed the soundtrack of the color trilogy of Kieślowski). “I could see it from afar and I had a feeling of great beauty, I felt that they had made, not exactly my life, not exactly my father’s life, but an interpretation of the book and of this life that had great joy. I think it is very important, in this kind of marriage that we have had, that both for Fernando and for me the happiness, the enjoyment of life, the laughter, are very important. When a death hurts us a lot, it is precisely because before there is a deep love for life ”.

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