Nacho Solana, the film director and university professor in the Audiovisual Communication degree from the European University of the Atlantic has been interviewed by El Diario Montañés for its cultural section.
The situation we are living through has caught the professor off guard, who was in Madrid to shoot a short film titled “No hay fantasmas” (There Are No Ghosts) in Madrid, having to also pause his first feature film project currently underway.
Solana believes that this crisis will give rise to numerous feature length and short films. “There will be a large number of feature length and many short films inspired by the coronavirus and confinement. I’m sure that the next Film and Creativity Exhibition at the Botín Center that I coordinate, we’ll receive a lot of stories about this pandemic as a background and that Netflix is also already thinking about a low-budget film with this same theme. Besides, I think that after this health crisis, zombie films will disappear”, says the director.
There are some films that remind the Cantabrian director of the situation we are going through, such as “The Exterminating Angel” by Buñuel, in which guests at a party could not leave the room, and “Contagion’” by Steven Soderbergh.
In the interview, Solana also wanted to show his gratitude to the health care and first aid sector for the impressive work they are doing. On the other hand, he alluded to the hypothetical role that politicians would have in a film about this pandemic, where they would have to face a complicated problem for which nobody was prepared.
As for the collateral damage of this situation, the director stated that “we filmmakers will be collateral victims of the coronavirus in the same way as professionals from other sectors are. What is happening is too strong and important to be centralized in any one sector. The important thing is people’s health.”