At the same time, the fairy tale aspect in your films is something recurrent, why is that?

Fairy tales are symbolic in their simplicity: they are not stories with which we identify; we never enter into fairy tales, but we observe them from afar. They stand before us like a decorated tapestry, something fresh. They take us back to when we were children, lying in bed, listening to the adventures of a destiny outside of us, distant, yet we manage to feel moved without being the protagonists. Furthermore, they refer to a narrative idea that does not belong to any one author: each storyteller enters a flow, they are authors in their own way, but they speak through words already spoken by others. I would like to work in cinema as a storyteller of fairy tales (laughs). Fairy tales teach us that the inscrutable order of reality must be respected and is beyond our will. There are no explanations; things happen because they must, and anyone who tries to oppose their will, anyone who does not respect this mystery, is ultimately punished. Those who have luck win, and luck or fate cannot be explained, they have no merit. They simply happen, and we must always welcome mysterious guests into our lives.

It also seems that you have a certain fascination with understanding how we relate to death.

When the Lumière brothers presented one of their first films about the demolition of a wall, a newspaper published an article that more or less said: death no longer exists. In the film, the wall fell, then it was raised again, and then it fell again… and then it was intact once more. Cinema was born as a tool for resurrection. So it’s clear that using cinema to investigate and tell something that unites us all and that we all fear, but with the magical sword of resurrection, is always interesting. Perhaps more than death, I’m interested in telling what unites us to the invisible, and returning an archaeological gaze to reality: our future is not just the sum of things we are meant to do, but also the sum of things we will leave behind when we are no longer here.

Although in general, your films feel very free, this time it seems you experimented much more with forms. Is it an idea to keep seeking new paths?

Freedom cannot be theorized. It cannot be planned or predicted. Every time I make a film, I simply ask myself joyfully and attentively where I am at this moment in relation to the story, and if there is really a need to add images in a world so full of images. Perhaps freedom arises from this sense of opportunity, of experimenting: if we really need to create other images, at least let’s try to do so without strategy, but with necessity.

I find it very interesting the idea of focusing on men, on something like “pure machismo,” but machos who no longer seem to have the strength to continue their stereotypes.

I wanted to talk about how machismo, in addition to being a plague for the female universe, is also a prison for the male universe. The tomb robbers are forced to present themselves as “real men.” They must be vulgar, they must flirt with foreign women and mistreat their own women; however, they are not happy. The mentality in which they live demands that they never show their fragility, but all of this oppresses them and makes them bad in the etymological sense of the term. “Bad” means in Latin enclosed, captured, squeezed in a cage that makes us unpredictable and aggressive. Malice always arises from a condition of coercion, from a cage.

I feel that this is another of the fundamental parts of your films, not making value judgments, showing pure characters. Perhaps there are no heroes or villains.

I decided to entrust the moral of the story to traditional narrators, who intervene and tell at another level what we are witnessing. I wanted to convey this collective value of the story as it came to me, through hundreds of eyes and mouths, I wanted to transmit this dimension of unreality that, nevertheless, does not go against the truth of a story. The story is true because I tell it to you, not because it really existed. It’s not important. The film needed a moral: the tomb robbers, so proud of destroying ancient archaeological sites and tombs to make money, are actually nothing more than “small gears,” pawns and victims of a much larger world than themselves. I had to say this. Tomb robbers are pawns who feel they have decision-making power, but who only serve the interests of an art market that, at least in the 80s and 90s, was completely eradicated from the territory. As the narrator says: the tomb robber is a drop in the ocean.