A Film About Couples is a feature film about two filmmakers who are asked to make a documentary about couples. Natalia Cabral and Oriol Estrada are a couple in their thirties and are parents to a little daughter, Lia. One day, they receive an offer to direct a documentary and they decide to make a film about couples, specifically couples in love.
The pair Natalia interviews many couples, always wanting to know how they get along and what their most typical problems are. But as filming progresses, wounds of their own relationship begin to open up, fights and doubts seem to be endless. But finishing the film will be their opportunity to reformulate their love for each other and their love for cinema.
Cabral and Estrada are award winning filmmakers, whose work straddles the border between fiction and non-fiction.
A Film About Couples is their latest work. The film had its international premiere in the
official competition of the Rome Film Festival and was part of the official selection of Open Doors at the Locarno Film Festival. It also won the Best Film Award from the Syndicat Français de la Critique de Cinéma, and a special mention from the jury at the Biarritz Latin American Film Festival. It also won three awards at the Gijón International Film Festival, Best Spanish Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay.
“Spectators of our films often ask us what it’s like to co-direct as a couple,” they write in the production notes. “It’s a question whose answer changes according to the day. Sometimes we can share crazy anecdotes about our struggles of egos or about our bittersweet quests to achieve the films we set out to make. Other times we argue and wonder if it’s worth continuing.”
“But like most couples, we move on, trying to show the best side of our relationship and our persona. One day, we realized that it was very important for the both of us to share the creative challenge of trying to make cinema with another person who is dissimilar from you because of differences of sex, culture and personality and the vital challenge it can be if you are also in love with this person.”
Adding that they “wanted to reflect on these concerns through a new project and we knew there was only one way to make it possible: through metafiction and alter egos of ourselves and represent them, in order to make the experience even more credible and intimate. That’s how we came up with the idea of creating a fiction film inspired by our real lives, where the plot of the story, the process of making a documentary, would be a creative process open to improvisation.”