Elena López Riera, filmmaker: “It bothers me a lot that women have to modulate their voices depending on who they talk to” | Culture

On Wednesday, March 27, the filmmaker Elena López Riera (Orihuela, Alicante, 42 years old) showed friends for the first time Brides of the South, the “most difficult and most personal” film he had ever made in his life. “All the people told me: ‘My God, this is not understood’, what they always tell me: ‘There are a lot of movies together, you get lost, go home and reflect and then maybe…’,” Riera recalls with a gesture. vulnerability. She did that: she went to her town, she thought, she called her editor: “Aunt, I’m 42 years old, I’ve been hearing this about my work for 20 years. I will make these concessions that they ask of me when they give me, hopefully, a film worth ten million euros. But this is something I have done by myself. I understand that it still sucks, but it’s my shit.” Two days later, The brides of the south was selected, as is, in the Critics’ Week of the Cannes Film Festival.

This little anecdote exposes a lot of López Riera’s torrential personality and that personality is the cornerstone of his work. For years as an academic, researcher, professor at universities in Geneva, San Sebastián and Madrid, as well as a video artist who has exhibited at the PS1 MoMA in New York, Riera has, since 2022, been labeled a breakthrough filmmaker thanks to Water, his first feature film, a cult film that also passed through Cannes to applause. The little anecdote is typical of her because, first, it is something that anyone else would keep quiet about; because the people, so important in its iconography, appear (“My grandparents did not have anything to eat in the post-war period and I have been able to study at a university in Switzerland, I am clearly an example of the Spain of democracy, but I do not stop being a people”) and because it places López in doubt, and not in authority, something that is more interesting because in doubt there is room for others and in certainty there is not.

Before the premiere of The brides of the south In theaters, the artist projects a video piece within the Mayrit festival (until August 25), All storms have the name of a saint, “about this very dodgy idea of ​​nature that we have been taught.”

Ask. He said that the headlines have given him problems. Is she very reckless?

Answer. The attitude of being afraid of public opinion, of not saying what you think for fear of being disliked, bothers me a lot. I talk to you here as if we had met over a beer because I have no other way of relating to the world. I have no notion of hierarchy or, on the contrary, I have it very marked and I rebel. Because of my origins, because of my family, because I come from a village: it really bothered me to see in my house that my grandparents always changed the way they spoke depending on who they were addressing. Changing your speech, your tone, even your volume depending on who you’re talking to… I’ve seen it too much and I don’t want to reproduce it.

Q. It’s not just your grandparents.

R. It makes me very upset and I try to change it not only with my films, but in my daily life. I try not to speak softly: I speak very loudly, they also criticize me for it, but the thing is… I’m fed up with the fact that women, or people of any type of gender but from a different social or geographical condition, have to speak differently. People who force themselves to change their accent so that they don’t think they are a redneck or a lollipop. My obsession is that how we modulate our voice has a lot to do with personal, loving, sentimental, gender, even economic circumstances.

Q. We could say that you are the stereotype of what people who hate Spanish cinema (conservative institutions like the PP or Vox) hate. Woman, feminist, author of social cinema… Do you recognize yourself in that portrait?

R. I have many friends who vote for Vox. Because eight generations have been street vendors in my family and I come from a Phoenician town in the southern eastern Mediterranean where we are used to living together. My militant friends in Madrid, who are from the capital, tell me: “We are already tired of doing political or feminist pedagogy. I no longer have any friends who are not on my side…” Maybe they’re right, but I didn’t grow up in Madrid, but in a town where the people there were were the people there were. You can’t change gangs. I am very used to living with people of completely different political ideologies.

Q. Is the search for the other a personal trait or just one of your cinema?

R. It makes me laugh a little when people call me “my cinema.” I’ve made some movies. I work through two mechanisms: going and returning. Going outside without thinking, always, that’s why I talk like that and why I’ve dared to do things since I was very little, and then come back and see what that does to me inside. Sometimes it hurts me, sometimes it does me good. But it’s going back and forth, back and forth all the time. In my work there are those aspects, the inside and the outside, the light and the shadow..

Q. They say about his cinema that it is poetic. Is it political?

R. I know that other people will see it, who are the ones who have to receive it, it would seem super Pharisee to say it. But there is something that seems more important to me than making militant or social-themed films: that the people in my filming do not suffer. I’m not saying I always get it, because I’m very bossy. Although I try to respect the unions, the hours, the salaries…

Q. Do you say bossy as a self-criticism?

R. Cinema, or at least the cinema that I practice, is not at all consensual. It’s super personal. I send it. I exercise my power, I’m not afraid to say it.

Q. Speaking of recklessness…

R. … talk about power, now. But I have no problem wanting power and exercising it on a shoot. In every power there is also a responsibility and I am responsible for what it means to have the last word. I am ambitious. A girl from a town in Vega Baja del Segura who was born in 1982, if she is not ambitious, she does not make films. I don’t know why I shouldn’t be or why that would make me a bad person. There is a whole gray scale between saying: “I assume the power I have by being a film director” and being an abuser or a dictator. I come from an artistic collective, I know what it is to work as a team.

Q. Along with the fact that they make it difficult for women to access power, there is, in small print, the fact that it also does not look good when they want it.

R. That’s why I express it all the time! I’m fed up with the idea of: “We want to destroy power and we want everything to be horizontal…”. No, dude, damn it.

Q. That everything is horizontal?

R. This right-thinking discourse of rejecting power and other things attributed to men… is infantilizing women and paternalizing them, because how can we want that, with how fickle we are. I don’t want my films to be horizontal. Sorry, I like to decide.

Q. Ask Coppola if he likes his films to be horizontal.

R. Coppola, let’s see what he says now, because the majority discourse is different. Coppola in the seventies would have told you: “Pa cool, cool me.” How can I not have the right, in a movie that I’ve been trying to make for five years, to decide the shot I want? In short, power and violence are very complex things and addressing them in an interview is very suicidal.

Q. The violence?

R. They are different and not so different themes, power and violence. The word violence has lost nuances. Zero tolerance for violence, go ahead, obviously I don’t want anyone to be mistreated, neither physically nor psychologically. But we have all surely exercised psychological violence. In all human relationships, I would tell you, there is violence. There is no horizontality between a mother or a daughter, nor a couple, nor between you and me, right now there is an exercise of power because I am speaking more than you.

Q. That is, like power.

R. If we think that violence is only physical, or psychological abuse in a couple, or in a work relationship, we are ignoring that violence is everywhere. And this is what worries me. Simplify things so much that we do not talk about them and that we cannot see that the real danger is in the everyday, in the constant, that we constantly exercise power, that we exercise violence, and we are victims of violence, constantly.

Q. When I described All storms have the name of a saint, said that it represents “this very dodgy idea of ​​nature that we have been taught.” Dodgy nature?

R. In the Western world, landscape and the notion of nature were invented in the 17th century. We are still in that Enlightenment story of romanticized nature, of the landscape as something that precedes the existence of the human being, something that we are there to contemplate. It isn’t true. Post-natural discourses are beginning to balance that the human does not exist as a figure detached from nature. This interests me with the aggravating factor of being from a town in the east that lives from agriculture.

Q. Nature, yes: ours.

R. The orange trees and the lemon trees and the palm trees did not appear in the east by spontaneous generation: I have grown up in a landscape and a nature that is a postcard completely manufactured, designed and drawn by humans. With rows of trees, with rivers that have been redirected by cement. I love and love this nature domesticated by humans, this nature full of shit and contaminated and, at the same time, the nature we have. To me, I guess because I grew up there, I find it extremely beautiful. Beautiful or interesting. I don’t know.

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