The power of the working class

The story is a classic one: boy and girl meet, both are Erasmus students in Barcelona and so will only spend a year together living in a typical shared apartment. First the sparks fly, then come the fireworks of passion and finally the big bang of (eternal?) separation.

Puzzled love might sound like any other romantic drama, except it has not one director, but 13 - one for every month of the developing relationship in the film. And these 13 filmmakers are not a group of old hands who received a commission from a festival or a group of short-filmmakers yearning for fame. No, they are last year's 13 fourth-year film students at the Cinema and Audiovisual School of Catalonia (ESCAC) and Puzzled love is a project coordinated by their teacher Lluís Segura, who, thanks to its quality, has already sold it to TV networks.

The film is also set to screen in the Zabaltegi section of this year's San Sebastián Film Festival.

ESCAC is the current youth academy of Spanish cinema. Dozens of technicians have emerged from its ranks (such cinematographers as Xavier Giménez and Eduard Grau), not to mention a handful of Goya winners and directors such as Roser Aguilar (Lo mejor de mí), Mar Coll (Tres días con la familia), Javier Ruiz Caldera (Spanish movie), Guillem Morales (Julia's Eyes), Elena Trapé (Blog) and star pupil Juan Antonio Bayona (The Orphanage), who is in the final phase of postproduction on The Impossible, about the Asian tsunami.

Part of ESCAC's success is down to its numerous practicals. As Segura, also a former student, says: "I came here wanting to direct and ended up asking for fewer practicals." Students normally start in year zero, a general introduction to cinematography, and follow the program for four years in which the practicals gradually gain weight until they exceed 50 percent of studies. Each year the school usually receives between 160 and 180 applications, of which 80 are accepted. It also offers masters and postgraduate courses. And, above all, there's Escándalo Films, the production company run by Sergi Casamitjana that nourishes the students and is also behind some of the aforementioned titles, including Puzzled love.

"It's funny," says Casamitjana, "with Puzzled love we are following the process in the opposite way to normal. After passing through San Sebastián, it will first be shown on TV3 [a unique fact as the Catalan regional TV channel doesn't normally screen works in Spanish], then on Canal+, and at Christmas we hope to release a couple of copies in commercial cinemas."

In reality Puzzled love was not intended for movie theaters. The students normally remake a classic title as a final practical test, but last year Segura decided to change that. With a 12,000-EURO budget from Escándalo, he presented his 13 students with a new challenge: tell a conventional narrative story, but in a special way, without resorting to experiments. "In that way, each person maintains their own style. The actors are themselves, the story advances in a linear fashion, but each chapter has its own director-writer and therefore its own style." And so in this way there are months told in the form of a false documentary, others like a sitcom, others told via a simple webcam...

The result is, according to some famous ex-ESCAC students, "the best Spanish film of the year." A month ago it was projected for all the members of the ESCAC community in the Urgell Cinema, the biggest in Barcelona, which was where the TV companies' interest was stirred.

It started as a simple game for its directors, but it's no longer that. On Tuesday eight of those directors - Carlos Pérez-Reche, Javier Sanz, Bruno Sarabia, Gemma Ferraté, Marc Juvé, Alba Giralt, Pau Balagué and Eduard Riu, which is to say, September, February, January, October, the second half of August, March, the first half of August and April, respectively - showed up at Escándalo's offices and talked about the 26-day shoot, two days for each chapter, which they did together in May 2010.

"In our individual practicals 12 out of 13 of us were talking about romantic conflicts, so it was easy for Lluís to suggest the theme," says Pérez-Reche. Afterwards, they made it their own, individual final project, a project that earned them top honors and in 15 days will take them to San Sebastián to see the film screened. Though even that isn't enough for some of the directors: "I'm excited about it, but I'd prefer to meet Martin Scorsese," says one.