El Sopar

This film attempts to approach the problem of political prisoners in detention for long periods of time. This meeting took place in 1974 in Catalonia on the day of the execution of garrotte Salvador Puig Antich, a militant anarchist. For security reasons, the shooting took place in a house far from Barcelona. The call for all the technicians and the people involved took place in stages and in the strictest secrecy and no one previously knew our fate, which was par for the course during the dictatorship. Once we collected reports of the execution of Puig Antich and the strong control measures and policing of events of this caliber, I suggested that if anyone considered the possibility of withdrawal, given the risk of being arrested, it would suffice to expose and without giving further explanations suspended filming. It was then unanimously decided that in fact, the best response to the repression of the Franco era was to shoot the film that we had set ourselves and we did. On set we had only the crew, some lights, a traveling and a 16mm camera with a “Nagra” for the direct sound. Prior to filming, I spent some time talking to players on the key aspects considered by all as the most significant and adequate to manage the dialogue between them during dinner. The strategy I decided upon was to shoot the planes on long shots at a rate not subject to the subsidiary or the dialogue, and lighting according to the level of cinematic representation that interested me. Dinner starts, treating hunger strike as an extreme form of struggle and ends when the last speech of Lola Ferreira left speechless at his companions.
Pere Portabella -2004.-