Antonio Chavarrías is passionate about History. One day he was reading a book and his attention was caught by “a couple of paragraphs that talked about a young woman who in the 9th century became an abbess. “Everyone expected that position to be symbolic, but she decided to exercise her power, which generated multiple conflicts.”
“I found all that fascinating and also that time, about which we know almost nothing, but which laid the foundations for what we are now,” he points out. Chavarrías soon decided that there was a film there and now he has turned the story of young Emma into The Abbess, a film that hits the big screen this Friday.
The abbess tells the story of Emma, daughter of Guifré el Pilós, count of Barcelona, who founded the monasteries of Ripoll and Sant Joan de las Abadesses, and who began the tasks of repopulating the Osona area, an extensive no man's land located between the Carolingian and Muslim domains. Upon her death, Guifré el Pilós placed her daughter in charge of the convent of Sant Joan de las Abadesses and entrusted her with continuing the repopulation tasks.
Emma, played by Daniela Brown, was immersed in several conflicts. “An internal one, born of renunciation, since she was a girl of only 17 years old who was forced to repress the needs to which she was awakening as a woman.” But by deciding to exercise power, the new abbess “also came into conflict with the other powers, with that of the Church and with that of the nobles, which are masculine, and with that of the rest of the nuns, a feminine power.”
And the convent was the place where women were confined for various reasons. For example, Eloisa, played by Blanca Romero, had been locked up for having a child out of wedlock: “Those women were there without having decided and, in some way, it was like a sentence, as if they had been sent to prison.”
But paradoxically, the convents of the Middle Ages were “a space of freedom for women.” “Power was not in female hands, women could assume it on occasion, although temporarily, when they became widows or were appointed guardians. The usual thing was that they had a husband and dedicated themselves to having children,” says Chavarrías.
However, within the convent, the nuns “escaped male control, which is why many of the great women of the time who have survived to this day were confined in a convent where they could read, write, learn music or study astronomy as they pleased. without giving explanations to parents, husbands or brothers,” he adds.
Chavarrías wanted to reconstruct the atmosphere of the time and to do so he sought “a winter climate.” Filming took place in the Loarre castle, in Huesca, “an uncontaminated place, where there are no urban developments or hotels or apartment complexes.” It was a “hard” shoot, carried out between the snows of January and February. The result “reflects the historical moment in a very plastic way, because we did not use spotlights and we filmed only by the light of candles and lamps,” concludes the filmmaker in this interview with La Vanguardia.
