PÖFF 2025: La Carn | Interview with Joan Porcel

I had the chance to witness the world premiere of La Carn at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, which film follows Lluís Garau, a young dancer whose performance, born from the randomness of Chatroulette encounters, becomes a daring exploration of desire, vulnerability, and the digital pulse of contemporary connection. Director Joan Porcel, who has long been drawn to artists’ inner worlds, transforms Garau’s live piece into a cinematic experience where dance, technology, and intimacy collide. On screen, bodies and screens blur, the line between reality and imagination dissolves, and we are invited to inhabit the very gaze of the performer, navigating a world both raw and hypnotically digital. I had the opportunity to meet the director in the wake of the film’s world premiere.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: How did you decide to collaborate with artist Lluís Garau? What inspired you about his performance that you decided to make it into a feature film and what transformations occurred in the process?

Joan Porcel: I first met Lluís more than ten years ago on the internet. We are both from Mallorca, but our friendship really took shape in Barcelona. It was there, a few years later, that I became deeply fascinated by La Carn, the performance he created as his final university project. In it, I saw an entire generation —late millennials— who grew up with a computer in their bedroom and built their identities through the internet.

What began as a straightforward documentation process of his performance eventually evolved into a collaborative rewriting with Garau, and ultimately into the creation of an audiovisual work that has become this feature film.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: Visually the movie is very explicit. Practically pornographical. How would you describe the film in reference to the explicitness and why is it so relevant to the point?

Joan Porcel: I don’t think the film is any more explicit than what anyone can find with a few clicks on a dating app or an internet search. That said, our intention was to portray —without filters— the whole marketplace of flesh, the interactions and sexual dynamics that take place in digital underworlds, particularly among men. To explore that territory honestly, it was necessary to make this journey without censorship.

Perhaps what makes it feel more uncomfortable is not the explicitness itself, but experiencing it collectively in a movie theater — a space where we’re not used to confronting these images together.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: What did you feel that dance brought to the story of the film?

Joan Porcel: For me, dance was the most honest entry point into Lluís’s inner world. I’ve always filmed creative processes because I’m drawn to that fragile moment when an artist exposes themselves, and in La Carn that exposure happens through the body.

Watching Lluís dance allowed me to understand things he wasn’t putting into words: his fears, his obsessions, his desires. Dance doesn’t just bring an aesthetic or a structure to the film — it becomes an emotional language that guides us toward his ghosts, his traumas, and his fetishes. Without that body in motion, the story wouldn’t carry the same truth.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: How did you approach the performative aspect of dance and theatre? What are some positive aspects and challenges connected to transferring the energy and making them pleasing to the eye on the screen?

Joan Porcel: From the beginning, we knew we didn’t want to simply record a performance. That decision opened up a different path for us: the film needed to transform the energy of La Carn, not just document it.

In the original performance, the spectator is a static observer — almost a voyeur. In the film, we wanted to break that distance. We wanted the audience to see what Lluís sees, to inhabit his gaze. That’s why we incorporated screen capture as a tool, allowing us to enter his digital world the way he experiences it.

We were also interested in revealing everything that lies outside the theater: rehearsals, doubts, travels, the off-camera conversations that build the person behind the performance.

Overall, I feel we managed to select the elements from the performance’s universe that resonated most with us and translate them into a cinematic language, so the viewer isn’t just watching but becoming part of a complete, shared experience.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: You combine fiction and documentary in your other projects. What fictional elements did you include in La Carn and how did you feel they contributed to your point?

Joan Porcel: I think La Carn is the project that comes closest to what we might call a fiction shoot in terms of structure: a technical crew, resources, planning, and a production design more typical of fiction than documentary.

Even so, every sequence in the film originates from real episodes, conversations, news items, discoveries, or characters that exist online or that have crossed paths with Lluís at some point. Starting from that material —vivid but often impossible to capture in real time— we had to reconstruct and recreate certain elements in order to represent them on screen.

For me, one of the film’s greatest strengths lies in that blend of languages: in the space where you never fully know what is entirely real and what has been reimagined. That ambiguity creates a fertile ground to explore identity, desire, and representation. In a way, it’s the very heart of La Carn.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: There is a strong visual aspect of the film connected to technology. Even all through the closing credits. What was the aspect of technology that you found so relevant to the story?

Joan Porcel: Technology —and specifically the internet as it existed around 2010— is the ecosystem in which these characters meet and recognize one another. It was also the environment we grew up in: we spent endless hours there as teenagers, shaping our desires, identities, and relationships through screens that today feel almost primitive.

We wanted to bring back that aesthetic, almost like a digital archaeology, because it holds emotional weight for the story. But also because the internet isn’t just a backdrop — it’s the space where Lluís forms himself, exposes himself, gets lost, and reconnects.

That’s why technology permeates the entire film, even into the closing credits. It’s our way of paying tribute to a digital language that marked our generation and that, in La Carn, becomes the fabric that binds all the characters together.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: There is a repeating element of a heart, very similar to a social media ‘like’. Did you use it ironically or as a way of saying that this is a new way of communicating and emoting? 

Joan Porcel: The heart serves both as an aesthetic device and an ironic gesture. Iconically, it represents a human engine; emotionally, it symbolizes the possibility of connection between people.

In the film, we used it as a kind of digital heartbeat that appears whenever the chat connection drops or when one of the participants chooses to leave the conversation. Its presence highlights the fragility of these bonds and the fact that, in most cases, these two bodies will never meet face-to-face.

I was drawn to that tension between tenderness and artificiality: a symbol meant to express affection, but one that also exposes how limited, precarious, and fleeting these new forms of communication often are.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: The story finishes open-endedly. Was this in reference of the online relationships that are here to stay or to the uncertain aspect of the bonds they create?

Joan Porcel: The story ends in a kind of temporal loop, almost like a warning to Lluís and to the way he connects with the world. We didn’t want to close his journey with a moral lesson or a definitive answer.

The idea was to guide the audience through this hidden universe —its codes, its desires, its silences— and then let each viewer decide what they believe should happen to the protagonist. The open ending reflects both the endurance of online relationships and the uncertainty they inevitably carry. Lluís reaches a point where he can repeat the pattern… or break it. And I liked the idea that the audience would be the one to complete that gesture.

Ramona Boban-Vlahović: Can you tell me about the title? It is connected to the corporal both in the aspect of dance, but also in the aspect of the online encounters. What did you want the title to represent?

Joan Porcel: The title La Carn, in Catalan, comes directly from the original performance and the name Lluís gave it. I find it fascinating that it can be read in two ways: as “Flesh,” in the most human and emotional sense, or as “Meat,” in a more animalistic and commercial sense.

Ultimately, the title represents something raw and exposed, but also something deeply primal and carnal. It perfectly captures the tension between the body, desire, and exposure that runs throughout the film, in both the dance and the digital encounters.