Laura Ferrés (Barcelona, 1989), graduated from Escac, feels immensely happy to be the first Spanish director to win the Golden Spike of the Seminci, a historic award that she achieved on October 28 with her debut feature film, The permanent image. It is an innovative work in its staging, with a predominance of still images that look like paintings, where anthropology meets fiction and delves into the weight of absences and the indelible links between women who emigrated from Andalusia to Catalonia. .
Education, the burden of inheritance, labor integration and equal opportunities between men and women are other themes explored in this film, of which the jury highlighted its "expressive audacity" in the form and the "lyrical reflection" it raises. . For Ferrés, what made him most excited is that they appreciated that it is a project "that avoids a pedagogical message." "Although the film deals with themes that seem important to me, in the end I am a cinephile and what I like is to think in terms of images and sounds and what happens when they are combined in the montage," she says in conversation with this newspaper.
The permanent image will be screened this afternoon at the l'Alternativa festival and lands on the billboard on Friday. "I think the film can reach many people," he says of a story that starts from the close case of his maternal grandparents, who came to Catalonia to work from Córdoba in the post-war period, although it later becomes "a fiction." . The film first places us in Andalusia with a teenager, Antonia, who gives birth to an unwanted baby, and then disappears in the middle of the night. Fifty years later we find ourselves in El Prat de Llobregat with Carmen, a casting director who is looking for "authentic people" for an electoral campaign and notices a woman who sells perfumes on the street and whose name is Antonia.
"The permanent image is a kind of diptych with two different spaces and times. I think above all about social class and the place we occupy in society due to the fact of being born in a certain family, since the film asks if we can go against our heritage and change." For Ferrés it was "fun to play with the viewer's expectations, because what we have seen at the beginning helps us to later complete that permanent image."
He describes the work as an "emotional, even tragic, story with a playful vocation, like a riddle." And in which there is music. "The characters sing the songs of my grandmother, a woman who loved to sing, worked in the fields and took care of her siblings. She lived through the post-war period and did not like to talk about that time, although she did so through of the songs, most of them were couplets and I grew up with her listening to these songs," she proudly comments about her grandmother, who suffered from Alzheimer's, and to whom she pays tribute in the film. "Cinema allows us to record things that would otherwise be lost."
One of the goals of the project was that it be played by unknown actors so that they would provide freshness, naturalness and authenticity to the narrative. Rosario Ortega, who plays the adult Antonia, was found in a bar where she worked; María Luengo, who plays Carmen, was booked leaving a veterinarian with her cat, and Saraida Llamas, the teenage Antonia, was discovered in a juvenile center. "The film has the vocation to portray a social class that we do not usually see in the cinema. And the thing is, the cinema is made by a high social class that portrays itself and when it does so of other social classes it is from paternalism. , because they don't know her well enough.
"Choosing these people," he continued, "was bringing to the screen a social class that is not so represented that I come from. And that's why the sense of humor comes in so well. The fact of feeling close to these realities makes it not so solemn." Obviously, I'm talking about serious situations that can be treated with humor. If you don't introduce humor into a film, you don't have a serious film," reflects Ferrés, who for a time worked as a casting director in advertising and remembers that when They said they had to find authentic people, "they actually meant poor."
The film, which previously screened at the Locarno festival, is released six years after his award-winning short Los desheredados, a family chronicle of economic failure. It has not been easy to make the leap to a feature film and it took him five years to write the script, for which he had the collaboration of Carlos Vermut and Ulises Porra. "I've been updating it a lot to get to the day of filming with the desire to film," he explains. "It actually takes a long time to come up with an idea and develop it, and you can see that when you watch the movie. I needed time for everything to make sense. Plus, the pandemic happened."
The director's mother is a big movie buff and took her to see Disney movies when she was little. "At ten years old she was already watching Hitckcock's." By chance, at high school she met a girl who wanted to study film and Laura considered that possibility. "At first I opted for photography direction because I am passionate about photography, but I saw that it fell short because I liked to explain things my way."
He is now working on a project idea at the Catalan Film Academy's script residency that will deal with anxiety and depression, a "systemic" illness that he went through while working on La imatge permanent. "It's called The King of the Air, I will probably film again with people who are not actors in El Prat and I will get closer to fantasy from real elements," she advances.
