We are delighted to bring you an evening of cinema and conversation with Helena De Llanos as we screen her feature documentary film Journey to Somewhere. The film is brought to us by longtime collaborator, curator and filmmaker Ruth Somalo as part of her ongoing decentralized series “Filming one’s own ghosts”.

Llanos is the granddaughter of renowned actors Fernando Fernán Gómez and Emma Cohen. What began as a film that sought to document her grandparents’ professional lives soon morphed into one that favored an imaginative rendering of their experiences over an analytical one. Through painstakingly combing through their archives, Llanos melds never before seen archival materials from Gómez and Cohen’s films, home movies, inventive animations and reenactments to create a vibrant, expressive homage to her grandparents. Using her grandparents’ home – which she now lives in – as the primary site of the film, we encounter vivid traces of Gómez and Cohen’s lives, feeling their absence and presence in equal measure.

Called  “A film with no genre, no limits and no fear” in Cineuropa, you don’t want to miss it! We’re lucky to have Helena De Llanos joining us in person, along with curator and filmmaker Ruth Somaloo, for a conversation following the screening.

Program

An everyday person inherits an enormous house from their grandparents and with it, a series of responsibilities and surprises. However, the talent and skills of the former inhabitants are not passed on. Fortunately, they continue to linger in the house, and they won’t take long to make an appearance. Their names are Emma Cohen and Fernando Fernán Gómez.

104 mins

Helena De Llanos is a filmmaker and researcher. She studied Hispanic Philology, she worked as a teacher of Spanish, literature and film history in various centers and universities; and she holds a doctorate in literature and film in the United States. Her audiovisual works oscillate between documentary and fiction. On occasions she has focused her work on giving a new meaning to audiovisual archives, creating pieces such as Diario de Cuarentona (2020), in which she worked with a large amount of archive material to create a story about the months of lockdown during the pandemic. Her approach, to date, is a junction between cinema with art, memory and citizen participation in cultural creation. Since 2016, she has been researching and organizing the written, theatrical and cinematographic work of Fernando Fernán Gómez and Emma Cohen through a multidisciplinary project that includes, in addition to several books, the short film ¿Nos hablan los muertos? (2019) and the feature film Viaje a alguna Parte (2021).

Ruth Somalo is a Spanish curator, filmmaker and researcher based in New York. She is currently a Senior Programmer at DOC NYC, DocumentaMadrid and The Architecture and Design Film Festival. As an independent curator she is interested in cinematic rituals and emotional experience in subjective cinema, the poetics of fragility, and reclaiming a non judgmental non anthropocentric space for emotions. Ruth’s latest films are constructed around taboos of the female body, gender specific illnesses and patriarchal structures in the medical establishment, ritual, mortality, human remains and experiences of loss. She is finishing her practice-based PhD at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid with her thesis project MENDING OBJECTS: Mourning, healing and the self in contemporary non fiction, and currently serves as the chair of the Programming Committee of the Board of Trustees of the Flaherty Seminar.