‍ WRITER’S NOTE

Can love that a catastrophe tore apart find its way back, and bring with it a life you never knew you'd made?

There is a moment in this film I took directly from my own life. A man arrives in Madrid, and someone asks why he's come. The answer: his two closest friends died, unexpectedly, and he came to get away. That happened to me. In 2013 I lost my two closest friends, months apart, and it was the beginning of everything I've written since. So of all my scripts, this is the one where my own grief is closest to the surface.

Leo is a New York gallerist carrying that exact loss when he goes to Madrid and meets Emilia. They fall in love standing in front of Picasso's Guernica, a painting made from atrocity that somehow became one of the most enduring images of the twentieth century, proof that beauty can be forged out of the worst thing that ever happened to you. Then the pandemic comes, and the world's newer catastrophe pulls them apart the way Guernica's did to an earlier generation.

The film braids those two disasters,1937 and 2020, around a love story, because that's the thing Guernica taught me: catastrophe doesn't get the last word. The painting outlived the bombing. And when Leo and Emilia finally find their way back to each other, there's a child between them he never knew existed, a life the catastrophe couldn't erase, made in the middle of everything falling apart.

I wrote it for the friends I lost, and for the strange , stubborn truth that the things we love keep echoing forward, through art, through a child, through us, long after the noise that tried to end them has faded.

— Leonard Tachmes, M.D.