Spanish filmmaker Guillermo F Florez pitched his feature doc Lord Take Me Soon as a Rough Cut in Barcelona in 2024. This year the completed film world-premiered May 13 in Official Selection.
Following the legalization of euthanasia in Spain in 2021, Florez set about finding potential characters to populate a documentary on the subject.
But when he found 86-year-old Carmen, however, he knew he need look no further. She was a woman who had already made plans to end her life and was more than happy about it. She had lived through the Civil War, was previously a nun, was married then divorced within a very Spanish conservative society, and had taken took several lovers, all the time following her own very unique path.
“She even had a date for it,” Florez tells. “But she had no legal ground to request the euthanasia in Spain because she had no particular suffering or terminal disease, aside from her age of course…In this sense I didn’t fully choose the subject, it also chose me. And I found myself embarked in the most unexpected project: a comedy about an old woman planning her suicide.”
“Thanks to Carmen’s personality, it’s mostly a life-affirming story, and a portrait of a Quixotesque woman who suffered the oppression of an extremely conservative society, especially of women,” Florez adds. “The elements were so interesting that I put everything aside and started filming, not knowing where the film would take me.”
Florez’s strategy was to make a 70-min feature, and a 52-min version for broadcaster. “But on the way we made a short as a proof of concept, since the film was polemical, provocative. The short (To Live in a Wild Sea) was published in New York Times Op-Docs, made a good festival circuit, and recently got nominated for an Emmy (News & Documentary).”
The feature version, world-premiering at DocsBarcelona 2025, is a co-production with France (La Société du Sensible – Nadège Labé), after having received the support from Docs Barcelona at several stages (Speed Meetings 2022, Rough Cut Pitch 2024, World Premiere 2025).
“We always try to construct a strong presence at the international markets, so the film participated at other industry events like IDFA Project Space, K-Docs, Ventana Cinemad and or Medimed. In some of them, the project was awarded with pitching prizes, which helped substantially to fund the project. But it could have not been made without the support of DocsBarcelona,” Florez underlines.
That said, getting the film to Barcelona was nevertheless a labour of love. “The hurdles were endless with this project. It was made with no funding, no crew, very old equipment, and following a very stubborn and wonderful woman who was very polemical, particularly for Spain. I guess this pushed away many funders and broadcasters. It’s possible that the (Op-Docs) short convinced some of them, but there’s always been a certain reluctance, also from festivals. But there were also brave institutions, such as DocsBarcelona now, France TV and EBS Korea, who acquired the film.”
“The project started as a research on the recent approval of the law of euthanasia in Spain, but quickly shifted into some kind of comedy about the end of life,” Florez adds. “Strangely enough, as I approached the moment of her death, I also started to not care about the film, to shoot badly, because I was getting very close to the protagonist, and the film felt like an irrelevant thing. I never thought I would find myself in that situation, not caring about my own film in a way. This, in the editing, became an advantage – to speak about our friendship and how much I loved her. I’m actually glad it was like that.”
Florez argues that the social context for the film is particularly important, that of a desire to conclude one’s “biographical” life as much as one’s “biological” life. “Mostly in western countries, some of the elderly population find themselves in this situation, having the possibility to continue their lives thanks to medicine, but with the price of lowering their quality of life. Some people draw their limit here, and some there. It is, at the end of the day, a very personal choice.”
While some countries are seeking to legislate for “completed life euthanasia,” ie when a person wishes to opt for a termination irrespective of their state of health, the law on euthanasia in Spain determines that illness and pain thresholds must be met before termination can be administered. “It’s indeed a very complex and nuanced subject, a dilemma of which the film provides no answers.”
The film, which will screen locally on the Filmin platform and which will broadcast on France TV and EBS Korea, world-premiered to much audience acclaim. “The reaction was very moving. People laughed and cried, and asked a thousand questions. This is a tiny film in many ways, but lots of people came to us to mention that it really touched them, or that they had a grandmother that was similar, or that it was a long time since they laughed that much in a cinema,” Florez concludes.
