'Forasters' (Part 1)

Forasters is the Catalan word for "strangers" or "outsiders." It's also the title of a Catalan film from 2008 which was rescreened on a local channel one night in January, as a last minute change of schedule. The reason: the sad and quite sudden death from cancer, just the day before, of one of the stars, Anna Lizaran, pictured above. She was one of the reference points of Barcelona theatre, lauded as a gifted and generous actor, and there has been much grieving for her across the Catalan arts scene. I have to say, to my shame, that I am not familiar with much of her work. The main reason is, also to my shame, that I do not go to the theatre very much - and Lizaran's very successful career was very largely in the theatre (see slideshow), Forasters being one of only a handful of major film and TV roles in her CV. I read one piece in the press that said she simply never bothered to get herself a film agent! Whatever truth there might be in that, one thing it does underline is that Barcelona has had a very dynamic theatre scene for the whole of Lizaran's professional life - basically, the post-Franco era from the 1970s on - and particularly in the Catalan language. Lizaran was both prominent in helping to construct this as a founder member of key Catalan companies Els Comediants and Teatre Lliure, and also sufficiently talented to build a monumental artistic career for herself within it, without much need to go outside the theatre or outside Catalunya (bear in mind that all performers who work in català are easily bilingual enough to work in castellano and most do so, to a greater or lesser degree). So there you are: the Barcelona theatre was one of the cultural areas where the Catalan language most demonstrated its renewed vitality when Spain emerged from dictatorship, and Anna Lizaran was one of the artists who personified that in her own career.

So they showed the film Forasters, which was quite close to the bone as far as tributes go, because of Lizaran's role, actually a dual role, playing two women in different eras who are themselves dying of cancer. But it was her performance that was the thing: and it did indeed stand out, and that was ultimately all the justification required.

However I have to say it was another aspect of my response to the film itself which made me sit down at the keyboard and begin writing this. When the movie began I initially pricked up my ears when it appeared one of the major themes was to be the interaction of a rather dysfunctional Catalan family with new neighbours upstairs who are immigrants - the film, adapted from a stage play, shows us two parallel snapshots of the same family, 40 years apart. In the 1960s view, an Andalusian clan moves in above them; in the 2000s, the same thing happens but the new neighbours are Moroccans.

But what then made me groan was that the moment the newly-arrived immigrants opened their mouths, they all spoke perfect Catalan. It was completely unreal, and instantly took a lot away from the film for me. Well, I kind of expected it in fact, because this has tended to be the rule rather than the exception in movies and TV fiction set here: Barcelona is represented monolingually in either Catalan or Spanish - and that is not the reality that I experience every day. The linguistic reality of Catalonia is a rich and dynamic and often mongrel mixture. Some people use mostly català, some people (a slightly larger proportion, according to most studies) use mostly castellano, but the great majority are bilingual and most use both to an extent, and everyone is exposed to both, and there's a myriad of varied dual language situations and lots of mixing, both artful and clumsy. And many people also speak English or a hundred other languages so that is also part of the mix; immigrants arrive and, especially in Barcelona, some never learn to speak or write Catalan well, but their children learn it - in particular, because its the vehicular language in all schools. So it's a complex linguistic picture, and for someone like me, who lived the first 30 years of my life in an overwhelming English-speaking environment (well, it was then anyway) and has spent the last 20 here, it's still a source of both fascination and frustration, every single day. And given that it's such a big part of my reality I crave to see it reflected more in locally-produced film and TV programmes.

(Note: this was called Part 1 because I was aware that this was only part of the story. Unfortunately I haven't yet got round to writing Part 2. Huge subject. One day...)