‘They Will Be Dust’: A Daring Right-to-Die Musical by Goya Winner Carlos Marqués-Marcet World Premieres at Toronto 

In “They Will Be Dust,” Carlos Marqués-Marcet, the Goya-winning director of “10,000 KM,” heads into a genre-bending exploration of life, love, and death. World Premiering at this year’s stacked Toronto International Film Festival’s Platform strand, the film is far from a conventional musical. It fuses contemporary dance and musical elements with the stark realities of a right-to-die story.

Co-written with Clara Roquet, whose “Libertad” garnered acclaim at both the Goya and Gaudí awards, the film is co-produced by Lastor Media, Alina Film, and Kino Produzioni— part of the same team behind Carla Simón’s Golden Bear-winning “Alcarràs.” Latido Films handles international sales.

The film centers on Claudia, played by Ángela Molina (“That Obscure Object of Desire,” “Broken Embraces”), who decides not to wait for her terminal illness to strip her of agency. Instead, she and her beloved Flavio (Alfredo Castro, a Larraín regular) embark on a plan to end their lives together in Switzerland. Their adult children are particularly appalled that their father would contemplate joining her “You think this is love? This is madness,” one decries. Mixed throughout are musical scenes where, in one, ambulance workers grapple, in choreographed chaos, with a distressed Claudia in her apartment. In another, park gardeners come to life and join with the singing daughter. “Music and dance brings you to places that words are not able to,” says Marqués-Marcet. “We believed these elements could help us grasp the abstraction that comes with death and the potential disappearance of self.”

The film’s visual and thematic aesthetics shift between the vibrant, artistic lives of its characters with the sterile, clinical environment of the Swiss clinic where they plan their final act. “We drew significant inspiration from the iconography of Spanish and Flemish baroque painters and writers,” Marqués-Marcet explains. The title nods to a verse by baroque poet Francisco de Quevedo: “will be dust, but dust in love.” This baroque sensibility clashes with the reality of the home in Switzerland. “Dignitas helped us a lot. They even let us shoot the film scenes in the actual home (it is not really a clinic, just a home) that they have set up to accompany people to die. The contrast came naturally from these two worlds colliding.”

Casting was crucial to bringing this story to life. “The movie needed two actors that act as opposite poles, the kind of opposite energies that make a couple stick together very strongly,” Marqués-Marcet reflects. Molina, with her unpredictable fire complements Castro’s quieter disposition full of restrained passion. Together, they navigate the fear, passion, and tenderness of a couple not wanting to accept one being without the other.

The film’s use of operatic tones further intensifies the stakes, adding layers of both comedy and tragedy. “To me these [operatic] works were the first musicals, the “pop music” of their time,” Marqués-Marcet observes. “My grandma used to tell me how when she was a kid people in Barcelona sang opera on every corner, and they would defend their favorite sopranos as they defend their favorite soccer players today.” This connection to traditional forms of music and performance gives the film a sense of historical continuity while it pushes the boundaries of what a contemporary musical can be.

Maria Arnal, the composer behind the film’s score, brought her polyphonic approach, collaborating closely with the director. “It was a thrilling process that lasted for months,” Marqués-Marcet recalls. “Sometimes we would sit in her home studio and she would improvise singing tunes while we wrote or rewrote the lyrics on the spot. Other times I would tell her just what I was imagining to happen in the scene, we would set a structure for the song and then she would appear the next day with a first version we would then develop.” The result is a vocally layered score that uses the voice, percussion, and samplers to create its soundscape.

Mixing genres and bending them to explore subjects is becoming more prevalent and raises broader questions about the future of genre hybrids in cinema. “We are living in very confusing times where it’s difficult to see things clearly in a simple way. The world is getting baroque while the idea of reality has been deformed,” Marqués-Marcet notes, adding: “I do feel that the mix of genres and the use of different codes can help to express the world that is emerging. The key is using it not as a way of escapism or mannerism, but to try to depict the times that we have to live in more truthfully. To me it feels like some kind of ‘augmented realism.’”