Bruna and Maria
“Ardara is two streets, three churches, ten pubs, a few shops dedicated to tweed and wool, a fishmonger, a butcher, a kiosk. A quiet, friendly town, where people greet each other with their hands when they pass each other”. Thus he described the Macia's father this Irish town in his diary, a travel notebook where he captured with his watercolors the places of a family road trip.
But burn is a trip that will unite three friends who are looking for their place in the world, and that will make them mysteriously disappear. burn it is also a documentary. The one made by a film team (led by the real directors of the film, Raymond Fransoy and Xavier Puig ) that investigates the why and how of the disappearance of the three ( of Macià, of Bruna, of Maria , who will never return home).
Macià and Elisabet in Cala Morella
will burn three stories that unite, in a beautiful and unique way, ** Menorca with Ireland **. And Barcelona with all three. This film gives voice to the inhabitants of Ardara (who are real residents of the village playing themselves) in that filming of the documentary about the disappearance of the boys; but also to Macia , whom we see traveling drawing by drawing, page by page of the notebook, recording every moment with his camera; and is the escape Bruna and Maria , who leave Barcelona one hot summer in search of an Irish adventure and wanting to forget, for a moment, the professional failure that Barcelona is for them.
“In cinema, the journey is usually a visual translation of an inner movement. Or the cause of that movement. Or the consequence. In our movie the characters are lost when they are at home and they look for each other outside . the journey for them it's an escape and Ardara is the place where they stop and meet”, Raimon Fransoy and Xavier Puig, directors of the film, told Traveler.es.
Bruna and María, among the Irish immensity
They came to Ardara because of Raimon, who was living in Bristol at the time and was looking for a location “that could seem like a paradise, but not a peaceful paradise, like the one that the Mediterranean, which we know so well, can offer us. we were looking for something wilder, more remote , a place with a beauty that was not inoffensive, ”he explains. A friend of his, Dallan Byrne, suggested his town: Ardara.
There they found much more than spectacular locations (such as the slieve league cliff - the highest in Europe-, the beach and the Maghera caves , and The Kilclooney Dolmen or the glengesh valley …) .
The three friends at Assaranca waterfall, Ardara
They found one tremendous oral tradition who helped in the search for those improvised actors who were his neighbors (among them, Don and Mary Byrne - Dallan's parents-) and also a book that became his bible In Connal's footsteps , of Lochlainn McGill “son of Ardara and husband of one of the film's main narrators, carmel . The book is a tour of the entire area and an exercise in recovering all the stories and legends linked to those places”, the directors told traveler.es.
But it is Macia , the son of the author of the notebook, our first contact with Ardara . He searches, incessantly, for those places that his father painted one day, to somehow reconnect with him and his mother, deceased long ago.
Macia in Lithica
This notebook, along with all those works of art, sketches, canvases, archives, photographs, accumulated in the garage of the family home, is what remains of them. And an image on the retina: her parents, she with a scarf around her shoulders, he with a hat, with his back turned, observing a landscape of cliffs, rough seas, rain and birds flying over the scene... in Ardar.
Something pushes Macià to leave Barcelona to return home for a while, in Ciutadella, Menorca . He starts the summer and comes back to read half an hour a day from the book Rhodes of Menorca at the Santa Rita Health Center, to have her heart broken in the Ulisses Brewery , to walk through the whitewashed streets of the town, to put your head in the water of Cala Morella , to feel lost but in the center of the hurricane in the labyrinth of ** Lithica **… To clean, at last, the artistic warehouse of his parents.
Macià, Bruna and María on the Rosbeg beach
In that cleansing he finds the white notebook which will serve as a roadmap for Macià's journey, an illustrated story about Ardara that contains a photograph of little Macià from 1994 in front of the don byrne bike shop . That's where it all starts.
Bruna and María are tired of Barcelona . They decide to escape, with a trip, with their backpack in tow, for Donegal . The bad weather will make them take refuge in a neighbor's house (which, in real life, is the charming wooden cabin facing the beach of Rosbeg, The Lobster Pod ) and meet Macià the next day in an improvised bath in the sea.
Bruna
The one in Barcelona and Ciutadella is a summer full of songs from Nueva Vulcano or Els Surfing Sirles , in which there are pool parties, drunkenness on Avinguda Diagonal... but also where there is the pain of getting older, for assuming responsibilities . Summer in Ardara is, instead, escape: for Bruna and María is to avoid job failure ; for Macià it is to find himself and finish his audiovisual project.
Along with Bruna and María, Macià will follow the pages of the notebook, but will also go off the path marked by it. They will dance, they will celebrate, they will laugh … you will find your little paradise away from the painful reality of Barcelona and Ciutadella. But also, there, everything will end, on “the highest cliffs on the continent”.
Bruna and Maria
And a curiosity of the production : the famous notebook is actually the work of Macià's real father (played by the director Macia Florit ): “We killed him in the movie-with his permission-but in reality he is very much alive and he is a marvelous painter with an extensive oeuvre. Is named Francesc Florit Nin . He made us the drawings of the notebook from some photos that we gave him, and we will never be thankful enough for that ”.
maghera
Bruna and Maria on arrival in Donegal