The film opens with generous portraits of many of the characters we’ll later follow in the mountains, as they lead relatively calm and fulfilling lives. Our main narrator is Numa (Enzo Vogrincic Roldán), a young man from a conservative, religious family. He’s introduced in what’s a typical moment for him, a signal of the transformation to come.
J.A. Bayona: The whole film is a journey to a place where Numa can make this self-discovery of who he really is. He needs to understand what is his shadow, what is his real nature. And somehow, by doing so, he needs to pray with that culture. To me, it was important to reflect the context he’s coming from. This is a real church in Montevideo; this is actually one of the churches that probably Numa went to many times in his life with his family. It’s very close to where he used to live. We are shooting in the same locations where the story happened. We really wanted to be very close to the reality.
Pedro Luque: Uruguay is a place that’s very green. It has four seasons. It gets cold and it gets hot, but it’s a pretty uneventful place. The highest altitude that you can get in Uruguay is 1,400 feet. It’s a nice place to live—nothing to do with the harshness of the Andes Mountains where they end up finding themselves. At the beginning of the movie, we set up this comfortable life that these people have—how warm it is, how happy they are, how loved and cared for, and how much of a support they have in their whole lives. This image, in a way, finds Numa in a warm environment. It’s cozy.
Bayona: It’s the spirit of being young. This is the frame that you can find in a movie like The Deer Hunter, for example. Movies from the ’70s, wide-screen. There’s a sense of the set, the location, enhancing the characters and what they are going through. There’s something very interesting with this scene, actually—I didn’t want to feel solemn, especially referring to religion. So there is this thing going on where a character feels kind of funny, passes a note to Numa. It’s a setup for something that will happen later on. We didn’t want to feel too heavy. There’s this element of comedy, which is totally the opposite of the scene that you will see later on when Numa passes a note to his friends in the mountain—which is not comedy at all.
The Storm
David Canfield
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