Pilar Palomero (Zaragoza, 1980) has had an unstoppable streak since she made her big debut with Las Niñas, that look at the transition from childhood to adolescence in Zaragoza in 1992, which swept the Goya awards last year and rose with the Biznaga de Oro in Malaga, among other awards.
Her second feature film, La maternal, with which she aspires to the Zinemaldia Golden Shell narrating a story about motherhood in adolescence, has moved the San Sebastian festival. Palomero assures La Vanguardia that it is "amazing to be in San Sebastian" with a project that came to him through the producer Valerie Delpièrre, who has a friend who is a social educator and told her about the close case of a pregnant teenager who they had been referred to a center for teenage mothers.
From then on, Palomero wanted to do a good job of documenting a subject he was unaware of and that had sparked his interest, and he went to one of those houses to talk to the director, where he met Carol, a social educator who appears in the film, and "she It put me in touch with a lot of older women who had been mothers in their teens and I was talking to them and I was fascinated by their experiences and their way of dealing with something like that. "
Some of these women come out recounting their personal situations in front of the screen at the moment when a 14-year-old girl who is five months pregnant ends up at the 'La maternal' center. Her name is Carla and she is a rebellious and defiant girl who loves to dance and who goes from studying to 'playing' with her friend Efraín, the father of the child she is expecting.
His mother, with whom he has strong arguments, also had it when he was younger and they live in a roadside restaurant in a town. The film shows how Carla and her companions deal with a complicated situation, since in addition to being teenagers and mothers, they are immersed in economic precariousness and at risk of social exclusion. However, the filmmaker's gaze does not seek to victimize them but rather to show the strength that they all achieve in order to have a second chance, surrounded by the understanding and care of the center's workers. "There are many prejudices with teenage pregnancies," adds Palomero.
The weight of the story falls on the newcomer Carla Quílez, a third-year ESO student from Barcelona who was discovered by the casting director thanks to some videos on her Instagram in which she dances and which went viral. "At first I didn't believe it when they contacted me. My mother didn't want to but we ended up calling to find out if it was true and when they told me that the project belonged to the director of Las Niñas, we said we had to try and getting here is a honor", assures this young woman of a surprising maturity for her age and who is not afraid of challenges, just like Carla in the film.
To make his character, which he shot with 13, he didn't know how he should face it and in the end "I took it as a game and after seeing the criticism that the film is receiving I am very happy". Quílez, who loves babies, says that she looked forward to the days when she held the child in her arms and that the whole process was a lot of fun and that the most complex thing was transmitting "those sudden changes that my character undergoes."
The maternal speaks of those patterns that are repeated between a young mother and the youngest daughter who becomes pregnant. "In the end they are wounds that have not healed and that are inherited. There is a lot of pain. Although the film follows Carla, it also tells the story of the mother in a different way. And thanks to the fact that Carla passes through the center, my character it forces him to think things differently and they end up finding themselves at a greater point of maturity," says actress Ángela Cervantes.
