Director María Herrera seeks the Goya with a brief movie about consent: “I have been told that removing the condom without warning is not a strong sexual assault” | Goya Awards | Cinema | EUROtoday

In two seconds the whole lot modifications for the protagonist when she sees the condom on the ground and that he continues with the penetration. The digicam focuses on his gaze and in that brief house of time worry and paralysis are concentrated that don’t enable him to decode an infinite variety of questions. The sexual relationship continues and each attain orgasm. But the whole lot has modified without end. Where is that good man she connected with the night time earlier than and who left the condom on till the top?

A Midsummer Night’s Taleby María Herrera (Madrid, 33 years outdated), narrates in 22 minutes a sexual assault that even has a reputation in English —stealthing—, however that, irrespective of how clear it’s within the penal code, it’s diluted in that class of refined violence. It is that huge catch-all wherein language acts relentlessly to make presentable, for instance, a rape wherein no bodily violence has been mediated. “I wanted to go against the idea of ​​the hooded rapist,” says the filmmaker, whose brief movie is nominated for a Goya within the fiction class. “But when I shared it with friends, filmmakers, teachers… people who are very studious about cinema, apparently sensitive, they told me that they didn’t understand it and encouraged me to rewrite the script, tightening the screws much more. They came to tell me that removing the condom without consent is not excessively strong sexual violence.”

Herrera didn’t concentrate. What she says she had heard from different ladies and pals, typically with gravity and ache, different instances with the shortcoming to acknowledge it. So he filmed an eight-minute intercourse sequence wherein he additionally places want, eroticism and vulnerability on the middle. “There is a lot of intimacy and something even physiological, of excitement. At that moment you don’t react, you don’t analyze. Having an orgasm does not invalidate the fact that you have suffered a sexual assault,” explains the director. “Because, besides, she really likes him.”

That’s why the protagonist stays to have espresso afterwards. And that can also be why so many different males, together with those that go to the movie screenings, ask Herrera: why are you staying? Why aren’t you saying something to him in the intervening time? What do you need to inform us with this? “The protagonist establishes the terms of the relationship from the beginning,” says, as soon as once more, the director, additionally winner of a Goya for her work as producer on the brief. Emotional structure 1959.

Once exterior that home, the protagonist goes by way of completely different phases that enable her to seek out some solutions. It is in that scorching tour of Madrid when the references seem that Herrera, he says, didn’t discover within the college syllabi, however found later. Agnès Varda, Céline Sciamma, Audrey Diwan, Annie Ernaux and Chantal Akerman are mirrored within the brief virtually as a tribute for having helped the filmmaker blow up the institutionalized movie canon.

The brief talks about the whole lot that has occurred within the final 5 years in relation to feminism and its achievements. “The last day of filming coincided with one of the demonstrations in support of Jennifer Hermoso; I wrote it thanks to a scholarship to study in New York when Spain was debating the law of only yes is yes“, remembers Herrera. Now it premieres in the course of this sturdy extremely response in opposition to equality and ladies’s rights.

“More than doing pedagogy, I am interested in making cultural works that help us change the collective imagination,” says the filmmaker. “That there are more women making films does not only imply that the perspective on certain topics changes. I don’t think it would be questioned if a woman makes, for example, a thriller“What I’ve discovered is that I inform one thing that’s nonetheless thought-about minor.”

The percentages of women nominated for the Goya are approaching the standards of equality laws, but Herrera believes that the figures hide another reality. “What matters do they permit us to speak about? What budgets do we’ve? Because I need to make an intimate movie value 5 million euros, not make it with one, as a result of this subordinates the entire thought,” he says. It took her almost two years to find funding for this short film and she didn’t even get all the funding she had budgeted for.

Money adds another pressure that inevitably ends up linked again to money: “You have to be excellent and exemplary all the time, you can’t make a bad movie, that is, you can’t make mistakes.”

Herrera recognizes the work of Carla Simón, Alauda Ruiz de Azúa, Elena Trapero, Clara Roquet, Pilar Palomero and many other women who in recent years have occupied spaces in the industry with their filming, with awards and public recognition. But she cannot help but continue adding other gaps to the equation and calls for more diversity in the type of women who access the industry “with all our conditions.”

The filmmaker says goodbye in the cafeteria of the Film Academy in Madrid, and goes up to a room where she is already working on her next project: a feature film that will deal with the identity dilemma of a woman over 60 years old after the death of her mother, whom she had spent almost a lifetime caring for. To write it, it is part of the Residency program of this institution. At the same time, she is already preparing to request official aid and propose a strategy to convince production companies and other companies to finance the project of a young woman who will tell the life of an older woman who, she says, “doesn’t have a look at all like Isabelle Huppert; extra like my mom, a lady from the neighborhood.”