Ana has traveled from Colombia to Barcelona in search of work to earn some money and invest it in her little sister's studies. She has found a position as a housekeeper in the home of a wealthy family. She's not doing badly: she gets paid every month. She's not doing particularly well either: her salary is low and she lives with the promise that if she works hard, she'll get the papers. Things go wrong when summer arrives and the family moves into her house in Empordà. They take Ana, who cannot spare a single day in all of August and, little by little, she begins to feel that enormous summer house as her prison.
“The initial idea was to make a satire on the Catalan bourgeoisie and a critique of the world of posh Barcelonans on their summer holidays,” explains Miguel Faus, director of Calladita, his debut film, which was screened at the BCN Film Fest after go through the Malaga Festival and several international film competitions.
Faus immediately saw that “the domestic worker was the perfect protagonist because she lives right in the epicenter of the world that I wanted to portray and, therefore, she hears everything and knows everything. The service girl is the perfect spy and, in addition, she has a certain critical view towards her employers and a conflict that is condensed in the title of the film: she has to be quiet, be practically invisible," says the director in an interview with The vanguard .
He adds that in the work of domestic workers “there is something of dehumanization, since everything is expected to be clean and that the food arrives on the table almost by magic, but as a robot would do it, because dealing with the person who doing those tasks generates conflicts.” Faus interviewed several service girls to write the script for Calladita and “the initial idea of social satire grew, because although this satirical criticism is preserved in the final film, there is also a lot of Ana's character, which is the result of all that investigation.”
Colombian actress Paula Grimaldo plays Ana in Calladita. Ariadna Gil and Luis Bermejo are her employers. “They are not especially evil people, but they do show large doses of frivolity and hypocrisy, two themes that interest me and that are very present in the film.”
The same thing happens with the couple's children, a boy and a girl in their early 20s, more or less Ana's age, who "don't put themselves in the shoes of the person who cleans their house" and even They go further “and act with impunity, because they know that if something goes wrong, Dad will fix it.” “First it was a minor prank at school, then a traffic ticket, then much more serious things…”
Money is the safe conduct for this impunity, “a class impunity, above all, in a country like Spain with a long tradition of corruption,” adds Faus, who wanted to show in his first feature film “the difference in social classes, but also the gaps of origin and race, because in Spain there are about 600,000 domestic employees of whom 96% are women and more than 70% are foreigners.”
The director concludes that Calladita is a film “that celebrates the freedom and resistance of an immigrant woman in a world governed and led by people who are not like her.”
