Anyone who has visited the Spanish city of Valencia during March would know of the Fallas Festival.
Derived from an old carpenter’s tradition of commemorating spring by burning pieces of wood used to prop up their lights during the winter, the 19-day celebration consists of more than 750 artistic monuments being set up around the city, all of which except one is then incinerated.
It is against this backdrop that creative collaborators and married couple Luke Eve and Maria Albiñana final installment of their Cancelled trilogy, UnCANCELLED.
Having dramatised their real-life during lockdown for the Rose d’Or nominated Cancelled, and again when Albiñana was pregnant ReCancelled, the 105-minute conclusion picks up the couple as they finally get to experience the Spanish wedding that was called two days before the lockdown was enforced. The big day has continually stalled throughout the past three years but Luke is running out of excuses and Maria is running out of patience.
According to Eve, Fallas Festival’s overarching themes of cleansing and rebirth were aligned with the couple’s story, which offered a microcosm of the pandemic’s different stages.
“Obviously, people are sick of pandemic stories and just want to move on with their life so that has been a hard task for us in a way,” he told IF.
“But we’ve always just unashamedly embraced the pandemic because its a big part of our story. A lot of other shows have tried to move away from it but there’s been very few shows in a way that have really tackled it and made it a part of their story.
“The telling of this final chapter was perfect because it was the next stage of our relationship, in terms of getting married and moving on, so there was a rebirth there, but more importantly it was about this idea that the pandemic was winding down and finishing and we were entering a new chapter as a people.”
Just how far the couple has come since filming Cancelled on a mobile phone in 2020 can be seen in the scale of UnCANCELLED.
Whereas they were predominantly only joined by Eve’s mother in the cast for the web series, which was confined to their flat, the feature film incorporates more than 40 speaking roles and between 30 and 40 locations.
Eve and Albiñana again wrote and produced the project, which the former directed.
Filming took place across six weeks in the first half of last year on a budget of just over a million with support from Screen Australia, which also provided development funding. The production also accessed the Spanish Film Commission rebate.
As with the previous installments, the line between reality and fiction was blurred, with the location of the couple’s actual wedding and reception used for filming, while real guests returned as extras.
“I have this joke that the recollection of our wedding is so muddled that I sometimes can’t remember what happened and what didn’t at both,” Eve said.
“We had a wedding photographer for the original but we’ve also got a whole movie in a way.”
In constructing the story, Eve said they were keen to flip the script on conventions within the romance genre, including putting the wedding toward the beginning of the film rather than at the end.
“Most romantic comedies finish with a wedding, whereas the wedding takes place early on in the film and a lot of things go wrong,” he said.
“For us, that was important because a wedding is very fantastical and it’s very easy to turn up and celebrate being in love, but a relationship is hard work.
“The reality of a wedding versus a relationship is very different so we wanted very much the relationship instead of the fantastical wedding at the end.”
Albiñana agreed, noting the wedding was one part of the journey they had undertaken through the concept.
“It’s a relationship drama about these people on a journey through the pandemic to having a kid and going to the next step,” she said.
“It shows how their relationship has changed, what that means, and what marriage means now to the both of them.”
While the film, which has already had a theatrical release in Spain, represents the end of the Cancelled journey, it’s not the final project that Eve and Albiñana will collaborate on, with the latter identifying co-writing with her husband as “one of the easiest parts” of making the trilogy.
“It comes very naturally but it’s not like it has gotten better – it was always good,” she said.
For Eve, the experience showed how different they were “but in a good way”.
“Creatively, that’s fantastic because we fill gaps where the other one can’t and support one another, so I think that’s been amazing in the writing and producing of it,” he said.
UnCANCELLED will be released on September 12 on YouTube.