LILI (Hani Dombe y Tom Kouris, Israel, 2016)

Esta semana ha corrido por mi timeline de redes sociales el cortometraje israelí Lili, dado que Hani Dombe y Tom Kouris han considerado que el film ya había cubierto su etapa festivalera y era hora de que el todo internauta pudiera disfrutar de su cortometraje de muñecos de interesante banda sonora.

Ambos artistas formaron hace unos años la productora Tom & Hani con sede en Tel Aviv. Desde allí han completado media docena de cortometrajes, y un buen puñado de anuncios, utilizando la animación stop-motion para mover muñecos humanos, como en el caso del cortometraje que protagoniza esta entrada, o figuras creadas con césped (vean el sobresaliente Grass).

Debo confesar que hasta que Lili no se ha convertido en un film de acceso público no conocía a ambos directores, y por ello escribí a Hani Dombe para que me contará un poco más acerca de este cortometraje y me enviara las fotos de detrás de las cámaras que acompañan el texto.

Parece ser que la idea principal llevaba en la cabeza de Dombe desde hace tiempo; que no es otra que la del paso de la infancia a la adolescencia, desde el punto de vista de lo que dejamos atrás y de los que conservamos de la etapa anterior de nuestra vida. Pues para ella "todo el mundo tiene un niño interior. Lili es de hecho una adulta al inicio del film pero sin embargo ella se ve a si misma como una niña".

Una vez que Dombe terminó el guion, se lo enseñó a Tom Kouris y juntos empezaron a crear el cortometraje, para el que dedicaron un año y medio de trabajo: desde la concepción del mundo en el que vive Lili (basado en los recuerdos de infancia de ambos en Israel), a decidir arropar el film en una monocromía amarillenta, dado que representaban la infancia de los directores y porque es el color de la tormenta de arena, el evento meteorológico principal de la trama.

En escenarios de cartón pintado situaron a los personajes, para los que eligieron una escala de 1:6. Los muñecos de la chica protagonista fueron creados en silicona, mientras que para el conejo utilizaron goma espuma y pelaje sintético.

Detalles y detalles del proceso de los que fueron dejando testimonio en su blog: https://www.tomandhani.com/blog

Comparto a continuación el texto íntegro en inglés que me pasó por email Hani Dombe, por si alguno tiene interés en conocer más aspectos interesantes de este film:

The idea of the film has been with me for some time. The thoughts about adolescence and the attempt to hold onto the past. Especially the question of whether there really is such a thing as maturation, because in fact everyone are children inside. 

I tried to express the experience of being frozen in time, the attempt to hold on to childhood even though it is not there anymore. I see this place among many people. And some people get stuck in it, as Lili does in the film. Lili is already an adult at the beginning of the film but she still sees herself as a child. She is stuck in memories, and lives in another reality. But Lili cannot enjoy her childhood, she just sits there and keeps it from running away. When the storm arrives, it forces her out of the deadlock, and only then can she experience the childhood joy.

After finishing the script, I teamed up with Tom and we worked together on the film for about a year and a half.

First, we tried to invent Lili's world. The visual inspiration came mainly from our childhood. We have researched this period in Israel. In order to understand how clothes and toys looked then we went to second hand shops, searched for collections, browsed many old albums, and designed everything according to this period. The color in the film is rather yellowish and quite monochromatic, partly because of the sandstorm that appears in a large part of the film and also because these are the colors that represent that period for us. It's a time when suburban neighborhoods still bordered on open areas and there were dunes near houses where kids could play or build a camp. These were childhood games that involve nature and imagination and represent some kind of innocence that almost doesn't exist today.

To figure out how Lili would behave, we had to get into a child's head, think about how she imagined her toys coming to life, or the spinning rack of laundry that looked like a carousel. How a child tries to fight a sandstorm with the means at her disposal, such as when she glues the toys to the roof with adhesive tape and thinks it will protect them from the wind, or when she tries to push the wind with a stick and a lid of a pot. 

We built all the sets and puppets on a 1:6 scale. Most of the sets were made of white cardboard, covered with wall paddy and painted. The girl puppets were made of silicone, quite a long process. First I scalped a model of each part of the body – head, hands, legs and the torso. From the model I made a plaster mold and then casted silicone into it. The bunny was made of foam covered with synthetic fur, a much simpler method. 

One of the challenges was making identical toys, including the bunny, in two sizes – small regular toys, and the big ones that came to life. Also, we had to make the older Lili, who had to look similar to the girl. Another challenge was to make the storm world, imagine it and figure out it's structure because it's very amorphic. Eventually it was made of Acrylic wool.