los chicos no hablan de amor
(boys don't talk about love)
scriptwriting for a feature film (2018)
This is my university thesis, where I assumed the challenge of writing my first script for a feature film.
Boys Don't talk About Love follows the story of Nadir, a Muslim teenager that travels to Barcelona to start a new life with his mother after his father accepts a job to go back to Yemen. Nadir has not seen his mum since he was a kid, so they will have to try to reconnect and get to know each other again. The university, and a new friend called Eloi, will become an universe where Nadir will question everything he considered settled about his identity.
OBJECTIVES
a) I wanted to contribute to the Spanish cinema industry telling the story of an unusually represented, but still real, character: Nadir is a teenager raised into religious values that begin to waver when he meets Eloi, an openly bisexual student involved in social causes.
b) To push myself as a storyteller setting up the story in a real historical context: the Catalan independence referendum of 2017. This decision let me experienced a part of the scriptwriter labour I had never done before: documentation.
how i worked to reach them
1. Homosexuality in Islamic culture is a controversial issue that thousands of LGBT+ people still face, so I used my social networks to contact Muslim people with similar situations like the ones Nadir experiences during the film. This allowed me to create a character from a real collective experience, a voice for those who cannot have one. Almost all of them wish to stay anonymous.
As I was collecting testimonies, I had the amazing luck to count with the one of the Muslim artist and musician Leo Kalyan.
2. I went to Barcelona for the first time and visited every real location that appears on the script. I speaked to catalonian friends and had long chats with their relatives and other colleagues to listen to really different visions about what happened the 1st of October. This gave me a wider perspective on a complex conflict that is still very sensitive in my country.
(Follow my trip to Barna with the pictures I took there!)
