I was only 18. I was five months pregnant. She wanted to have her daughter, she was convinced she was a girl, and start a new life. But Sandra Mozarowsky’s dreams faded one night in September 1977 when the young woman fell from the balcony of her house in El Viso in Madrid and died.
Mozarowsky’s story is a true story and is still remembered by film fans and, above all, by gossip magazines from the 70s, because Sandra was one of the popular film stars that was so fashionable at that time.
Borja de la Vega learned about Sandra “almost by chance, one day looking for stories about actresses from the 70s and I was shocked by her story, which is tremendous,” explains the director in an interview given to La Vanguardia at the Sitges Festival. where he presented The Last Night of Sandra M., a film starring Claudia Traisac that tells stories about what the last day of the late Mozarowsky could have been like.
Sandra is left alone at home. Her parents are gone for the weekend. She receives an editor and a photographer from Semana who do an interview with her graphic report. She then chats with a boy who brings her a package for her father. Later, Inma, an actress and friend of hers, arrives to visit and they both talk about her dreams, about the difficulties of a profession in which women are forced to undress to have a role, and about Sandra’s pregnancy.
The protagonist confesses that she is afraid. She receives other visitors, strange, threatening, but she does not open the door. It seems that the father of her baby is someone very important… “This film, although it is based on real events, is an exercise in imagination, a story, but the portrait of the character is as objective as possible, because to construct it I based it on in the interviews of the real Sandra”, emphasizes the director, who with this film also delves into the cinema of the exposure that “in general and with some exceptions, was very mediocre.”
The genre presented women as a mere object for the enjoyment of men and it is surprising that Sandra’s parents allowed her to make that type of cinema when she was a minor. De la Vega has a theory about this: “At that time, being modern was understood just the opposite of what it is now. I absolutely believe in the good faith of those fathers, who tried not to limit freedom.
from her daughter. “Nowadays a father who allowed his youngest daughter to undress in the cinema would seem like the most archaic thing in the world, but in the Transition, it was seen as a gesture of modernity,” he points out.
Things have changed. Traisac, who plays Sandra in the film, points out that “for an actress it is very difficult to be the owner of her own career, but it is true that things have changed, because although in Spain there has not been a great Me Too, the movement “It was so great that it has given actresses the power to denounce. And now there is great support, which did not exist so explicitly before.”
