The film that took Silbo gomero (the whistled language of La Gomera) to the red carpet

The film ended, and the discerning audience at Cannes gave it a standing ovation. Or in the words of Odile Antonio Báez, who was invited to the film festival as part of the delegation from the Cabildo (Island Council) of La Gomera, “the film met with an incredible reception and the entire theatre was fascinated by Silbo gomero (the whistled language of La Gomera)”. Under the title The Whistlers the famous film director Corneliu Porumboiu has managed to make one of the most remarkable hallmarks of this Canary Island shine out on the big screen, becoming one of the driving forces that could lead it to win the Palme d’Or.

The movie tells the story of a corrupt policeman who travels to the Canary Islands to learn Silbo gomero, an ancestral whistled language that allowed the island’s inhabitants to communicate across long distances, over the rugged terrain, turning human language into tonal whistles that can be recognised from a distance. This police officer’s motivation for learning Silbo gomero (the whistled language) is his intention to communicate secretly with a mafia boss he wants to break out from prison. According to Otros cines critic Diego Batlle, The Whistlers not only showcases the beauty of the so-called “perla de las Islas Canarias”, or pearl of the Canary Islands (yes, that is how it is presented at the very start of the film), but also “recycles and then subverts the elements of genre cinema”, managing to “break away from his previous films and nearly all of those of his country”.

Because, how did a famous director of Romanian origin end up in the Canary Islands? What made him become enamoured of La Gomera? How did he manage to convey the importance of Silbo gomero (the whistled language) in his film? The answer to the latter question lies with Kiko Correa, a teacher of this peculiar language, who accompanied the entire team during the shoot and taught the actors to master the art in question. According to his declarations to Europa Press: “We worked for two weeks before filming started, from four to six hours a day, and during the shoot itself, and their will and determination was quite surprising”.

Correa is not the only teacher of Silbo gomero (the whistled language) on the island. Actually, it was made a mandatory subject on the curriculum of the primary schools of La Gomera in 1999. This measure was designed to highlight the value of something that forms part of Canarian culture and which, in spite of being unknown to many, even in Spain itself, was declared Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2009.

Despite having brought an unknown language to the fore on the red carpet of the Côte d’Azur, there is one rather curious fact that Corneliu Porumboiu admitted to journalists and movie buffs during the festival: he himself has no idea of how to practise Silbo gomero (the whistled language of La Gomera). Nevertheless, as he acknowledges to Javier A. Fernández in El Viajero, the supplement to El País, this does not mean that its essence and sound haven’t changed his life, perhaps forever: “It seemed to me to be something poetic, I was drawn to the idea that an ancestral form of communication could continue to be used in today's world”.