As much as we may wish it otherwise, the majority of us are bound by the experience of the soul wrenching pain of heartache. That relationship to which we’d eagerly pinned our futures, dissolving into the abyss of an unknown faced alone. Channeling the still raw emotions of his own lost of love, Jordi Estrada’s As We Die transmutes those feelings into a lyrical contemplation of what once was. Below, Jordi eplains how pain became cathartic creation.
As We Die came out as an escape route. I was in the very painful days after breaking up with my boy. My mind was blank, it did not know what to think or feel. I had never had a partner before, and I had never felt this kind of ‘abandonment’ or ‘farewell’. I felt an explosion of emotions, feelings, thoughts that were collapsing, and I tried to channel it by listening to music and writing. Some sort of script came out, I guess it served as a kind of reflection letter or farewell to ‘us’, at a time when I didn’t understand and could not stand what was happening.
I found in the preparation of the shooting – very guerrilla, very hasty, very visceral – the way to cope with those days a little better and also the way to try, perhaps unconsciously, to understand and order all the confusion that invaded me on the inside. All that experience was concentrated in the summer months, with long, warm days, and life everywhere. From the contrast of how I was, in a hole, and what surrounded me emerged the essence of the piece.
Our intention was to narrate a ‘trip’, a ‘fragment of life’, a sensation or emotion that I had at that particular moment: I felt abandoned and only saw emptiness everywhere. Although separated, my head was still with him, while ‘us’, what we were together was fading little by little, between tears, memories, dreams.
We worked a mood where the darkness at the end of the relationship was mixed with the magical, brilliant and naive beginning.
In the video we see different disconnected moments, wrapped in a dreamy atmosphere, something magical, but spooky. We worked a mood where the darkness at the end of the relationship was mixed with the magical, brilliant and naive beginning, when I met him. It’s a kind of love that mutates, that ends. Seen now, it’s been a few months, I’m afraid I fell into a somewhat selfish point of view.
What I was able to portray was what I felt in those moments: that my boy loosened ballast, that he freed himself, that he abandoned me to the world. I saw him, in a very calm and cold way in those final days, when I was devastated. In the piece I wanted to portray the boy losing his ’guide’, facing an uncertain future, while looking for answers in his head about to explode, while the girl, something more in peace, only asks him to let her go.
We did not work with a closed script. We started from a very basic structure, with premises of staging and characters. At the same time we let ourselves go by what came out during the preparation and during the filming. In a few days we put together a small team and we started shooting. We did not have a narrative or a clear rhythm during the filming. We did not have the final form of the piece clear in our minds, but we knew what sensations and what atmosphere we wanted.
We sought a sad but luminous calm, tense, like a dream that ends in a nightmare or a headache that gets stronger and stronger. The darkness, the sea, the tears, the stormy sky envelop us. ‘Ethereal’ or lost moments in a rather stylized way, although I think quite naturalistic, that make up in their assembly the idea of a couple coming to an end.