J.A. Bayona enters the Goya press room. He receives enormous applause from journalists. It is well past two in the morning, the usual European time for press conferences. Bayona has just swept and made history – 12 statuettes for The Snow Society, the third most awarded film at the Goya after Mar Inside and ¡Ay, Carmela! – And with hardly any respite they soon take him to Madrid to catch a plane to Los Angeles, where he has the food for the Oscar nominees. He's happy. And the first question does not fail: he has been seen crying hard while raising his first Goya for best film. “Don't we want other masculinities?” He laughs with journalists.
“I have been very excited. All the films are always very difficult to make and I have been excited to see the entire team recognized, especially Matías Recalt, the revelation actor, with whom teamwork is somehow rewarded,” he explains. And he admits that after going up to collect the Goya for best director he did not have it all and thought that he could do it like in previous attempts with The Orphanage, The Impossible and A Monster Comes to See Me. Director, yes, film, no: “We had three attempts and we didn't get there,” he remembers.
But yes, he did and he went back on stage with Penélope Cruz, Cecilia Roth, Marisa Paredes, Antonia San Juan and Pedro Almodóvar, who presented the grand prize of the night in Valladolid to commemorate the 25 years of the Oscar-winning All About My Mother. and, with luck, passing the baton of the statuette to Bayonne.
And there, in the final stretch of the gala, in Bayona's speech when collecting the award for best director and in Almodóvar's before opening the best film envelope, two of the ghosts of the night appeared: Vox, a party against which the director from La Mancha launched his darts directly, and Netflix, the platform so many times demonized as a threat to cinemas, but which was the only one, Bayona recalled, that made The Snow Society possible after years of attempts. The third ghost, sexual violence against women in cinema and in society, had already permeated the entire ceremony led by Los Javis and Ana Belén, who was blunt: “Here in the cinema, it is also over.”
It was a gala with many Catalan winners and a lot of talent from Escac – among them Bayona and Estibaliz Urresola –, in which the rivals of The Snow Society were light years away in the winners' list. The other great favorite of the night, 20,000 species of bees, by Urresola, collected three awards, novel direction, screenplay and supporting actress. A love and Creatura took nothing. You know that one, only the award for best actor went to David Verdaguer, the same as Close your eyes by Víctor Erice with the Goya for supporting José Coronado. Malena Alterio was the best actress for Let Nobody Sleep. And Pablo Berger gave the surprise by winning not only the award for the animated film for Robot dreams but also the adapted script, the only award of the night that escaped Bayonne.
A Bayona who recalled that “we have spent ten years listening to people telling us that this film was not possible, that a film in Spanish could not be made with this level of ambition, and thanks to the appearance of Netflix, thanks Netflix, they were wrong. . Can be done. And I say that they were wrong because the film, even though there was no audience for it, has 150 million viewers around the world, a film made in Spain in Spanish. And even though an agreement was not reached with the two largest cinema chains in Spain, we rolled up our sleeves and went on the road to fight for it and we brought 450,000 spectators into theaters.”
A combative spirit that also presided over the gala, in which the situation in Gaza was denounced and in which Almodóvar finally spoke of the other elephant in the room: he took advantage of the award for best film to attack the controversial vice president of Castilla and León Juan García-Gallardo, with whom Vox attended the gala for the first time and who had asked on Friday that the cinema make “real demands” and talk about the problems of farmers and ranchers, who “are not gentlemen.” “The gentlemen are the ones who want to make a living by producing cinematographic works that no one sees later at the expense of millions and millions of euros that Spanish taxpayers pay with great effort,” he stated.
The presence of Vox at the gala was questioned – the Berlinale has withdrawn the invitation to the AfD party – and Javier Calvo, one of Los Javis, before the start referred to “some words from Pedro Zerolo, who said: 'In my world you Yes it fits, but I don't fit in yours.'” Almodóvar ironically: “One of these young men is talking to you who collect subsidies and then make very bad films that interest no one. I'm going to state the obvious to that man. The money that we filmmakers receive as an advance we more than return to the State through our taxes and Social Security, creating thousands of jobs.” After the gala, García-Gallardo tweeted: “Very
