Adela is a young sweeper who works the night shift in Madrid. She is overweight and her face shows anger, indignation and bitterness. She is a lonely woman who, while driving the garbage truck, listens to Gemma Nierga and decides to call her program 'Talk for Talk' because she wants to confess that she intends to do terrible damage to those guilty of turning her into a human ruin. "My soul has been rotten for years," she blurts out point-blank to the popular announcer, saying that she doesn't know what to do to make her give up on her desire for revenge.
The mission is going to be accomplished after Adela comes across a group of drunk men who harass her and make fun of her plump appearance. That morning the viewer will witness as a witness the brutal reckoning that the protagonist has been planning in a story shot in sequence by Hugo Ruiz, whose feature debut has given him the award for best new director at the Tribeca festival. the only Spaniard to have achieved it in the independent film competition founded by Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal. "I'm super happy, it's something that has been very crazy and that has put us in the spotlight in many places," the screenwriter of Una noche con Adela, who also went on to festivals such as Abycine, Zaragoza, told La Vanguardia. , Seville or the Mostra de Sao Paulo before landing on the billboard this Friday.
Experienced in short films (Taxi out of service, S.O.S. and La cena), Ruiz assures that the origin of this intense thriller arose at the moment he saw Victoria (2015), starring Laia Costa: "I told myself that I would love to tell a story in sequence shot of a person at night. The sequence shot conveys that feeling of closeness, rawness and reality in accordance with our character and his circumstances, with the time in which everything happens, because we need the viewer to feel that he is there without separating for a single second from Adela. I, in addition, have always had a slightly strange obsession with street sweepers since I was little and I thought it would be perfect to explain the story of a powerful sweeper. The flash came to me of a powerful woman walking on the street with his work uniform and that he had to carry out a mission that takes place at night in Madrid... and then the pot went away," says director Maño, laughing.
Laura Galán lends her body to that street sweeper with a lot of bad temper who smokes non-stop and snorts cocaine - "I'm a tough woman. I like vice" - before she became known with Piglet, another revenge thriller that won the Goya for best new actress in 2023. "I had written the character for a well-known Spanish actress and I sent her the script, but one day I saw Laura's reel on Instagram and I knew it was my Adela. We did a reading in my house and it was incredible. So I had to say no to the other actress," she admits.
A Night with Adela was filmed just now two years ago in a record time of six days of rehearsal and three days of filming. "The credit goes to the magnificent team I had, who was so focused on not messing up and were so good that in the end what came out turned out." This plan will be accompanied by violence, music, religion and sex in a Molotov cocktail in order for the protagonist to redeem herself from a trauma that has weighed like a weight since her youth. "Laura gave it her all. She was very focused and stripped herself both emotionally and physically to embody a woman who has never had control of her life and who is going to have it that night because she needs to turn the page and let go of the backpack she is carrying. It's like a wounded animal that makes a bad decision, but it's the only way it can move forward," says Ruiz.
The other protagonist of the feature is the voice of Nierga, whom the director admires "because I heard it in my house when I was little and when I sent him the script it turned out that he was fascinated by it." Furthermore, the conversation between the two helps the viewer "get to know Adela a little better." The 48-year-old filmmaker admires Woody Allen and Quentin Tarantino, "I'm in love with both of them," although in his first feature the clear references are Taxi Driver and Funny Games. Self-taught, he confesses that he has always wanted to be a filmmaker, although he started late "due to life circumstances, since I have worked a lot at night, and now I am delighted with what I am experiencing."
In fact, there is no one to stop it anymore. A Night with Adela is going to be the first film in a trilogy that will include Dante by Night and Sunday Night. "They are three self-contained stories that happen on the same night and in Madrid, filmed in sequence, but they have nothing to do with each other." Regarding the second installment, which he hopes to shoot soon, he predicts that "people are going to fall on their asses" due to its mix of Tarantino and quinqui cinema. "I think the audience is going to stay glued to the screen," he promises, "without wanting to be pretentious." The last one will be available by 2025. "It's going to be very good" he concludes with great confidence and enthusiasm, although aware that he will not be able to please everyone with his "somewhat complex, hard and rough" cinema.
