Julio and Ana have been together for over fifteen years. They don’t look at each other or touch each other anymore and daily conflicts have become the norm. This evening, Ana has invited the upstairs neighbours over. Salva and Laura are slightly younger than them and welcomed them with open arms when they moved into the building, but the constant moaning and groaning coming from their apartment has become a source of arguments for Julio and Ana ... perhaps it’s jealousy, they wish their own sex life was as spicy.

This evening, the neighbours will become both the instigators and victims of an emotional tsunami, brought on by an unusual and surprising proposal. The four neighbors can’t help but get caught up in an evening of excess and catharsis.

I wrote THE PEOPLE UPSTAIRS thanks to my neighbour. Or, to be more precise, because of my neighbour. For many weeks, her excessive and always inappropriately timed moaning provoked heated debates and many arguments in my home. It was then when, without realising it, I found the inspiration to write the comedy I had so long been looking for. Her moans were going to unleash a gale of words and reproaches in an ordinary marriage that had never been said before.

Without a doubt, one of the greatest, most ambitious adventures that any of us can experience is life as a couple. A major challenge full of adversities, where struggles become routine, the trenches are endless, and comfort given for wounds suffered is often scarce or unhealthy.

I wrote THE PEOPLE UPSTAIRS inspired by the films and scripts of the American cinema of the 30s and 40s and by authors such as Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, Ben Hecht, Ernst Lubitsch and other exponents of the purest Screwball Comedy style that I always liked so much for the dynamism of their comedies and the sharpness and rhythm of their clever and always surprising dialogues.

It was essential to shape the film to have a quartet of top-class actors. Actors who could walk the fine line between comedy and drama. I have been lucky enough to work again with Javier Cámara and Alberto San Juan and benefit from our shared trust and experience from previous films. Belén Cuesta had been on my list of actresses I wanted to work with for a long time, for her comical versatility and on-screen personality. And finally, Griselda Siciliani; an Argentinian actress that I had already enjoyed as a spectator, and chance and fortune brought us together unexpectedly.

Without them, THE PEOPLE UPSTAIRS would have been another film.

Cesc Gay is a filmmaker and screenwriter who studied Film at EMAV in Barcelona. He is known for his profound look at characters, his irony and sharp sense of humor when it comes to reflecting human weaknesses. He portrays his characters with deep simplicity: adolescents discovering themselves, twenty-somethings in a hurry, thirty-somethings with doubts, forty-somethings in crisis ... A filmmaker who x-rays emotions with a contained, sincere, delicate look focused on the issues that define his generation.

FILMOGRAPHY:
2020 - THE PEOPLE UPSTAIRS
2018 - FÉLIX, series
2015 - TRUMAN
2012 - A GUN IN EACH HAND
2009 - V.O.S
2006 - FICTION
2003 - IN THE CITY
2000 - KRÁMPACK
1998 - HOTEL ROOM