Claudia (Ángela Molina) and Flavio (Alfredo Castro) are an elderly couple who, after the terminal diagnosis of her, decide to go to Switzerland to perform assisted suicide together. This is the premise of Polvo Serán – Polvere di Stelle, Platform Award at the TIFF 2025 and fresh of the award Monica Vitti at Ángela Molina for the best female interpretation at the Film Festival in Rome 2025. On the occasion of the Italian release on 22 January 2026, we interviewed Carlos Marqués-Marcet, director and screenwriter of the film.
What was the aspect that fascinated you more than this story, of this theme linked to death, and which then prompted you to make the film?
I often think of death. Not tragically, but it’s a fact that we won’t be here forever. I have a couple of old friends who one day have unveiled my plan to go to Switzerland to commit suicide together. I was shocked and the news broke my heart, but I also found it an interesting point, because once you made such a decision you have to deal with it. And I was very interested in exploring this, so I proposed to him to do a workshop with me. We worked for a month together, trying to figure out how to tell the story, how to find pictures, moments, scenes, gestures and dialogues just, without fear and not only in tragic key. In fact, we also explored the most comic aspects, because we were confronting something absurd. I should have filmed the film with them, but then it took so long to write the script that, when we were ready for filming, they got sick and it was too late, so I had to rewrite part of the film and find new actors.
There is not only death in Polvo Serán: it is also a film about memory, about reliving the past and not having regrets before dying.
Sure. For me it is also a film about life at the same time, because life and death are two faces of the same coin. I wanted to make a film that reflected on the meaning of death, without trying to give an answer, but I think it is important at least to think about what you have, your loved ones and the love you receive from the people who are next to us. I was interested in seeing what happens in cases like this within a community like that of the family, the effect that causes people who will continue to live when you are gone. This is not a movie-sage on a subject, it is an experience in which I try to accept the fact that we will not live forever. And somehow I think that realizing it helped me to be more comfortable about it.
The theatre plays a fundamental role: the protagonists are teatrants from all their lives, the film is structured in three acts and there are often sequences that directly recall the theatrical experience. When did you realize it would be such an important part of the film?
I think this film has been very influenced by the Baroque era, because during the 17th century there were topics such as this in a much more formal but also very interesting way. The title, Polvo Serán, comes from a verse of a poem by Francisco de Quevedo, a famous Spanish poet of that period, who reads “Polvo serán, mas polvo enamorado” [“Polvere will be, but powder in love”, ndr]. At the time it was very popular the philosophy that “the world is a theatre”, so when we were trying to figure out how to get to the heart of the film we have brought everything back to this concept. And we thought it was fun to start the film with a curtain, since the curtains are gone. In addition, the idea was strengthened by the casting of Alfredo Castro, because he is one of the most important Latin American actors but above all because he is a theatrical director and is the father of contemporary theatre in Chile. Its theatre is a culturally important place for the country. So we used this knowledge and put it in the film to talk about topics considered absurd and strange in a fun way. After all, we ourselves are always reciting in life, we ourselves are constantly playing a role.
In fact, it almost seems that Claudia and Flavio are staged their last, great act before leaving permanently. And it’s like you, as a director, made this film their last immortal performance, or at least lasting over time. Do you think cinema has this power, to somehow extend the lives of the people and the stories it tells?
In part, yes. Surely it is a comforting thought, to think that what you are doing will last over time. But the truth is: who knows what will really remain in the future? When I was younger I was hoping to make movies that would last forever, now I don’t know. At this point in our history, I don’t know if humanity will last long. Therefore I am no longer sure that the permanence of something over time gives it a deeper meaning. Obviously the theatre is much more slave than the moment, because it only exists when you look at it and then it remains in memory. Cinema gives you more time, but not eternity. To me watching a movie is like watching a photo album, and when we are old we will still be able to relive those memories. At the same time, however, when I make a film I try to think about how to give it a sense here and now, at this precise moment.
Last question, about musical and dance sequences, which seem to be hallucinations of the protagonist and in part remember the choreography of the musicals of the origins of Busby Berkeley: what were your references to make them and how did you find the right tone and how to integrate them into the movie?
It was very difficult. The idea was born during the workshop, because in some moments words were not enough and therefore actors used music, dance or song. Music somehow allows us to express ourselves when words are not enough, but I was not sure how to convey this thing in the movie. Then I thought about my love for musicals, from which I am very fascinated, especially those of the origins. I have gathered some of the best Spanish talents of the performing arts, from singer-songwriter Maria Arnal to the dance company of Marcos Morau, La Veronal, and together we have worked on musical scenes. For me it is not just Claudia’s imagination, it is not like in Dancer in the Dark by Lars von Trier, which is set in a realistic world and then moves into the fantastic world, which corresponds to the inner world of the character. What I like about musicals is that I am, in a way, the opposite: in Singing in the rain Gene Kelly is in love and when dancing in the rain is as if his inner world contaminated the real. So for me Claudia’s visions were actually shared with her husband and daughter. In realizing them I tried to combine the tradition of Busby Berkeley, which you mentioned, and that of Ginger Rogers, which are very different. I tried to figure out how to retake the moving bodies, how to get the dance camera involved, but always keeping the tension between the two traditions, because I didn’t want the choreography to look too similar to those of Busby Berkeley, I didn’t want the bodies to disappear and just remain the composition.
L’articolo Polvo Serán – Interview with director Carlos Marqués-Marcet proviene da SentieriSelvaggi.
