Limbo by Marina Monaco (Forgetting Love)
Last we spoke to Marina, her short film ‘KIDS’ was premiering here on purenowhere.com. One of our favourite projects to date, we celebrate it for weeks afterwards — and were ecstatic to see her name pop up in our inbox again shortly after, with news of her latest film, ‘Limbo’. Here, she dives into the creative process behind her new project, plus shares a new gallery of behind-the-scenes photos (in quintessential Marina-style, as beautiful as the film itself).
Limbo became a very personal, almost therapeutic, project; it transits the complexity of forgetting an old young love.
The aesthetics and theme of this film establish a direct dialogue with my photographic work. I wanted to use an emotional and abstract point of view, where my creativity had no limits. The film was a great challenge to me since it’s my debut as a director, working with a cinema camera and a big team. The filming lasted only 2 days and there were 14 of us, all aged between 18 and 22, who carried out the project.
From my still young perspective, I seek an authentic and close approach to the topic of teenage memories through this composition. This is how I decided to tell a story based on my own experience, that has gone through me and that I didn’t have to make up from scratch: I found some notes about how painful it was for me to let go of an old young love and that’s what inspired me to write.
Limbo is an intangible space where forgotten, distorted memories remain, where our imagination plays and we collide with our own darkness, our dreams and happy moments.
It’s an invisible space inside ourselves, a place where we try to keep others alive.
In the film I wanted to recreate some memories and experiences of mine from my teenage days – the goal was to mirror the different stages I went through at that age. It is an experimental film since we don’t get to know the characters and the plot is quite undefined. Limbo leaves its story open to speculation and the spectator's imagination, involving his emotions and subjectivity.
Thanks to the edit I managed to disrupt the point of view: we don’t know if we are inside her head or his. Perhaps it’s a shared mental space. We don’t know. And it does not matter, either.
The idea of materialising memory is what defined the structure of the film.
I captured the same shots in different scenes to later connect them on the post-production process and shift from one emotional state to the other. This is born from the fact that there are times when one thinks of a memory and automatically jumps to another one since they have something in common that connects them and our mind associates it.
The cinematography was really important as there’s no sound or script other than the music itself. I worked obsessively on this point because I wanted to display the emotions of the characters. Being an independent project, I wanted to enhance the little resources we had by giving it a creative spin. That’s why the script composition was open and flexible from the very beginning, I aimed to leave room for improvisation and my own intuition.
A few days ago, I came across a question Murakami asks on Norwegian Wood: “What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?”. It gave me goose bumps because it reflected my exact idea and it was strange reading it after picking the title and having finished the film. Apparently, many of us wonder the same thing.
Written, Directed & Produced — Marina Mónaco
Starring — Joaquín Ibarra & Sofia Toledo
Director of Photography & Camera — Lucio Castelnuovo
Editor — Eric Fernández
Color Grade — Santiago Cantillo - Maravilla
Color Art Director — Lucas Bennett & Isa Gomez Tendler
Stylist — Facundo Bettencourt
Make up & hair — Inés Pizarro
First Assistant Director — Maria Burgos Oviedo
1st Camera Assistant — Pampa Aramburú
Gaffer — Kato Aramburú
Best Boy — Felipe Calandrelli
Electrician — Tadeo Gabelloni
Producers — Kevin Bohdanowicz & Julieta Roth
Data Manager — Agustín Lanus
Still Photography — Marina Mónaco & Chiara Sofia Yanni
Poster Photography — Marina Mónaco
Voiceover — Josefina Amon
Graphic Design & Titles — Sofia Mastrogiacomo
Model Agency — Civiles
Songs — “Incompleteness” by Max Cooper & “a1” by Ólafur Arnalds & Nils Frahm