MALDITOS
PerSo Award

Director’s statement

When we met ‘Malditos’ for the first time in November 2015, they were performing their show in Madrid, in one of the most important cultural centres of the city, Naves Matadero. They told us their story as a group and their struggle to find their place in society. We immediately felt a strong connection because of our creative work as filmmakers and the misleading balance between success and self-realization that permeates our own lives; we realized how their story could represent not just the story of a group of theatre actors, but the story of our generation.

Given the conceptual importance of their performance which ironically plays with the idea of the reality show reframed by theatre, we thought of creating a film which could add another layer of meaning, while reclaiming documentary cinema’s vocation towards reality. During the last 3 years, we have been collecting audio and video materials self-recorded by the main characters with their mobile devices. In this way, we had direct access to their private lives through positive and negative moments, breakdowns and accomplishments, ordinary but poetic fragments of themselves.

These intimate, powerful and engaging stories on the backstage of their lives will be told with the priviledged and not filtered point of view represented by their mobile devices materials. Additionally, beside the performance and the self-recorded fragments of everyday life, we added another meta-cinematic layer, the actors discussing, in the back stage, their own performance: this third layer plays with the ambiguity of the protagonists’ identities. Are they acting or are they impersonating themselves? Is their self-awareness playing against our intentions as directors? We believe the film finds a sort of chaotic sense in opening up to this dimension of ambiguity and stupor towards reality.