_{The Mirror and the Window by Diego Gutiérrez}

The Mirror and the Window might best be described as a story of two deaths foretold. In the documentary, filmmaker Diego Gutiérrez takes two people very close to him as his subjects, both of whom know they will soon die. One is the director and editor Danniel Danniel, speaking in a restaurant in the east of Amsterdam. The other is his mother, Gina Coppe, in the final stretch of her life, in her high-rise apartment in Mexico City. She has had a series of brain strokes. Both invited Diego to capture them on camera.

“I did not start working on this project thinking that I was going to make it a film,” Gutiérrez remembers how he began the assignment.

Danniel, a close friend and collaborator, had called him out of the blue and told him that he had terminal lung cancer. He said: “I do not know why but I want you to film [me].” Gutiérrez responded immediately, “yes, of course, no problem.” At that stage, it was not clear even to Danniel what he was looking for in this last cinematic testament: a record for his children, perhaps.

Gutiérrez started filming Danniel in February 2017. His friend died three months later in May. Later that same summer, his mother contacted him. “She said I have an idea for a new film. I want you to film me because nobody believes me that I have this sixth sense that tells me that I am going to die. If you film me, we can prove it.”

In his mother’s case, the sixth sense was not entirely accurate. Gina would stay alive until early 2020. Little by little, during the time Gutiérrez was filming her, she forgot about her premonition of her own death. Instead, she was using the opportunity to share some very intimate revelations about the love of her life - and it was not Gutiérrez’s father.

A year or so later, the director thought to himself, “maybe I can do something with these two stories.” That is when the idea of combining them in a single documentary came to him.

As he cuts between the two stories, Gutiérrez includes images of ice and frozen water. ”I felt I needed a third element to make a bigger film… I definitely have a very strong feeling with landscape, I guess.” He had read logbooks from people who had travelled to Antarctica. “The more I read, the more I felt there was a strong connection.”

Gutiérrez was not worried about intruding on raw and private moments. “I use filmmaking to connect with people around me. In most of my films, the subjects are people very close to me, my parents or my best friends I grew up with in Mexico, my nanny, my neighbours etc.”

The director uses his camera to create a bridge, an arena. “The same way as we all can use two glasses and a bottle of wine or a table and the light of a candle,” he explains the intimate atmospheres in his documentaries. Both Danniel and his mother had been filmed by Gutiérrez before for other films and knew exactly what to expect.

Outsiders often say to the director that it must have been difficult to edit a film featuring two people, both now dead, with whom he had such a close bond. “I always say it was not difficult - it was a pleasure! It was an enormous pleasure. Actually, when I stopped editing, that was the moment when I really started missing them. I started feeling, ok, now they are really somewhere else. [But] the year and a half I was busy with the material, it was a joy.”

At times during the editing, the filmmaker felt that his two subjects were connecting with him, he adds.

During IDFA, Gutiérrez will not just be showing the film. The Mexican-Dutch director is due to give a talk on his career. (His previous films include the Golden Calf-winning Parts Of A Family). He suggests, though, that if you really want to get to know him and his work, you should watch his documentaries. That is where you will find the real answers about what motivates and moves him and how (as he puts it) he “relates with my beloved ones.”

The Mirror and the Window is produced by DOXY Films and is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund.