Spanish actress Elena López Riera dazzled at Cannes with her debut feature, ‘El agua’

The movie Water, starring debutant Luna Pamies alongside Bárbara Lennie and Nieve de Medina, a story of women whose lives are conditioned by natural disasters in their land, co-produced by Spain, Switzerland and France. El Universo spoke exclusively with the debut filmmaker.

How do you feel at Cannes, debuting your debut feature in the Directors’ Fortnight?

Very happy, like floating. I think it is the dream of any cinephile, not only to be in Cannes but also in this section, the Directors’ Fortnight, which she has always been like a very important guide. Her editorial line is the one that most represents me and the one that has inspired me the most. You make a film in your town, with your family, and suddenly you’re here and you say, is it true or am I making it up?

How has the jump from short to feature film been for you?

It was the natural evolution. When imagining this story, I thought of a film that required a decent scope and duration, because it could not be developed in a short film. If I wanted to mix the evolution of a young heroine with her mythology and catastrophe, I couldn’t solve it in 20 minutes. We started writing the script and doing the casting in a very organic and natural way, which in turn fed the script. The preparation of the film has been to deal back and forth with the real thing.

The spontaneity that is seen in her is impressive. Do you think that this naturalness contributed to creating magic, to its charm?

For me it is very difficult to differentiate documentary from fiction because I come from the former. Faced with this film that does not have much fiction, but appeals to the fantastic, I decided to shoot it as a documentary, which is what I know best. The team was small, as we have always done: as a family. I don’t know how to make movies, I haven’t gone to film school. Rather, we did it based on intuition and above all with the passion for this art. I am very struck by the observation capacity of human beings, so we decided to forge this dynamic between the actors and actresses, who did not know each other previously and whose majority are not professionals. We have tried to generate life and then record that as if it were a documentary.

Are the inserted statements of various women with their own version of the catastrophe caused by these floods spontaneous?

Rehearsed, impossible! Neither those women who appear throughout the film telling pieces of that mythology nor I were prepared to make that official, or to put it on stage. The trust that was generated with them was very important. This, anthropologically and sentimentally, had a great impact on me. Some of these women are my mother in real life, my neighbors in the village, and some of them I didn’t even know. During the casting we saw more than two thousand women of all ages, many of them told us that they did not know how to speak. I asked them “how come you don’t know how to speak if you are speaking?” It broke my heart to feel how society’s thinking is structured so that a woman’s voice does not feel legitimate to exist. That is why, when making and editing the film, the idea came to me to pay them this tribute to give them back the dignity that their word deserves. There will be people who like it and who don’t, but I am very happy to have given them this space.

Do you think that feeling intimidated in this way is related to gender?

I do not have any doubt. I hope I’m wrong and they prove me wrong. I realized when doing casting how, in general, women speak more softly, always after men, and how difficult it is for us to speak in public. Throughout this entire filming process I made this reflection: it is incredible how hard it is for us to take our word into the public space. We have so ingrained this thought that our voice is not important, that it is very difficult to get rid of it.

How did you achieve the images of the flooded town?

I know archive images and they fascinate me because I remember the flood of 1987. I was a girl, so naturally it marked me a lot. I started writing this story with my screenwriter and we didn’t imagine there was going to be a flood. We started the script in 2018 and the following year there was the biggest flood in memory in the last 150 years. He left eleven dead, who are the ones who leave at the end of the film. And it is that for the first time we had mobile social networks and everyone could document it.

The summer romance of the two protagonists is overwhelming. But something happens in it that changes everything, but the reason is not clear. Pregnancy problems?

We don’t know, because I like to leave all the sex part suggested. I’m a bit old-school in this regard, even more so if minors see her because she did not want to confront them with anything or worse that the cinema imposed a sexuality on them. Everyone can imagine what they want, but it was important that reality surpasses fiction, especially with catastrophes. When we saw that what was written came to life and we had to record a catastrophe, we wondered how we would achieve it. But when it happened and we saw how people told it live, we knew that no filmmaker in the world would do it better than reality itself.

Does the story have autobiographical traces?

Yes of course. It is in my town. That’s where I was born, where I grew up and, of course, the film has a lot of me. I don’t know if both in the characters specifically. At least I realized that I wasn’t projecting myself on the heroine, but on her mother, being from the generation that corresponds to me within the three women that make up the story. The film is autobiographical in terms of the exploration of that terrain, of the place and of those rituals, because it is my house, it is my land. My mother and my childhood friend are in my film. There are many emotions. She gives you a lot but, at the same time, she is very violent when facing everything, even looking at yourself in the mirror is violent.

There are a lot of things suggested, a lot of symbolism. Can you express yourself better through film?

Yes. And the fact is that the film has many layers, and that’s just how life is. I could have made a more minimal and refined film, but it would not correspond neither with me nor with my reality. Situations and symbols are not exotic for me because they are part of my daily life. It is the daily life of that place. It was important for me to incorporate how many things add up to life, they are not always organized as the cinema presents them in its structure of beginning-knot-end. In life it doesn’t happen like that.

Have you felt any special difficulty for being a woman to make movies in Spain?

I try not to feel that way. We are fortunate to be at a very good time for women in Spanish and world cinema, which was natural for it to happen. I also try not to fall into that role of victimization because in the end you just repeat that pattern. Beyond cinema, there is something structural that makes us feel as if we have to apologize for doing things. It is something to reflect on all of us and, personally, it helps me to talk about it with other women.

In your next projects, do you intend to continue delving into this subject that is so familiar to you or will you take other directions?

I have to talk to my psychoanalyst, because maybe it’s not such a good idea anymore to keep digging into these things. I’ve been working on the same issues for about ten years. I don’t know if it’s the town that invites me to make movies or the movies that invite me to return to town. There is an incestuous and passionate relationship. For me it is a good excuse to return home and be with my people, which is what makes me happiest. It is true that perhaps it is time to go looking for other territories. I really like to live. I don’t feel very identified with the need of the industry to produce, produce, produce. I am slow. I need time to think, to observe, to live. The fast pace of work is fine, but living is better.