Her final degree project became a collective feature film, Júlia ist, which she signed with other classmates. Now, at only 31 years old, she is already an established director, because her second film, Creatura, has been a success since it won the award at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes last spring until this Sunday night when it swept the Gaudí Awards. .
Elena Martín already flies alone. She wrote the script for the film, along with Clara Roquet, directed it and also stars in it. Her next stop is the Goya for which Creatura has garnered four nominations. Before traveling to Valladolid, Martín makes a stop at the La Vanguardia editorial office to explain the details of this film that delves into the complexities of female sexual desire. An almost taboo topic that cinema and other artistic disciplines have not yet explored in depth.
How has the collaboration with Roquet been to write the script for Creature a four hands?
We knew each other very little, through some common friends. When I had been working on the film for more than a year, researching and writing, I sent it to Clara just so she could tell me if she saw any possibility of it being filmed. I wanted advice from her, but she loved it and suggested we write it together. It was very exciting. We understood each other very well and now we are very friends.
Why did you decide to make a film about female sexuality?
Talking with my friends I realized that we have a very complex sexuality. I began to ask other women of different generations and I understood that no one has a calm, crystalline relationship, without edges. Almost all of us suffer contradictions between our body and our desire.
Was this how the investigation started?
Yes. Some of the women I spoke to told me, for example, that they can’t have sex with the light on or that they are very embarrassed to see themselves naked in the mirror or that their breasts don’t feel like their own or that they don’t masturbate because they hate it. gives trouble Other classmates told me memories of childhood masturbation. I thought: we never talked about this and I was very clear that I would make the film.
The investigation continued with specialists…
I’m a millennial, so I do therapy and it didn’t take me long to ask my therapist about it. She became an advisor in the script process. At one point we thought about Mila, the protagonist of Creatura, being anorgasmic, but she advised us against it because this dysfunction was not consistent with the picture that the character presented.
Do problems with sexual desire have to do with a lack of education in this matter?
The girls who are now teenagers have received talks at school but, even so, they feel it is something very scientific or didactic. Education in shame still exists. I think the most convenient thing would be to teach that sex is wonderful, but that it has its time, its space. And to be able to speak it much more naturally.
Mila suffers from a blockage due to the type of relationship she had with her father when she was a child. Is that common?
Some men treat their daughters as if they were babies while they are children, but when they get their period and their breasts grow, they no longer know how to relate to them. There is a constant negotiation during adolescence between fathers and daughters.
Does that cause difficulties talking about sex?
Even people who have a very fluid relationship with their children can have difficulties, because there is very intense social pressure. The idea that if you tell your parents that you have sex you will disappoint them is very widespread. It is very different to tell your daughter ‘don’t let me down’, as Mila’s mother does in the film, than to have a calm conversation with her to resolve her doubts.
Creatura suggests that sexist behaviors are still widespread among today’s adolescents…
There is no education in consent or respect. Many kids still believe that to belong to the group they have to perpetuate certain attitudes. Perhaps the key would be to educate boys by showing them that actually acting cocky is a sign of weakness and lack of self-esteem so that the idea spreads that the boy who identifies with the bully archetype is actually a loser.
Despite that, is there already a generation of young people educated in equality?
Yes. The boys who play Mila’s group when she is a teenager come from a theater group, they belong to a cultural and open environment. We were filming a scene in which the characters had to rate a girl’s body and they felt very shy when doing so, they didn’t see it well and I had to put it in context, because the situation occurred in the year 2000, when feminism It had not yet taken root and it was not understood that these types of attitudes are verbal aggression.
Have things changed for girls too?
In a way. The young actresses in the film told me that now, when they go out partying, if a guy touches their ass, they know perfectly well that they have the right to call his attention. But that doesn’t mean guys stop touching their asses. But at least they have a much clearer discourse than that of women of our generation, since many of us have had experiences that were abuse and we have only understood it over time.
Mila is not anorgasmic, but she does not enjoy sex with her boyfriend, Marcel (Oriol Pla). Which is the diagnosis?
It is not a diagnosis, because he does not suffer from any pathology, but he does have a psychological condition caused by his sexual development in childhood.
When does sexual awakening occur?
It occurs approximately, because each person is different, between three and six years old. They call it the genital stage. It is an awakening of the nerve endings throughout the body and it is a moment that is related to the desire to know, that stage in which the child constantly asks ‘why?’. The first impulses are always towards parents or guardians, because the child feels safer with the people he is close to. Rejection or abuse can mark the sexual future of that child.
Do men also suffer from blockages?
Of course, we have seen it in many of the men we have interviewed and that is why the male characters, Mila’s boyfriend and father, also suffer from strong blockages. Marcel assures that everything is fine, but he is uncomfortable with sex that goes beyond what, let’s say, is normative and it bothers him that Mila suggests that he slap her.
What are your projects after the success of Creatura?
Theater. I will start rehearsing after the Goya. It is a work by the VVAA collective, with which I have been working for many years, for the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya. I will work only as an actress and I am looking forward to it. I also have something lying around that could end up being a movie, but at the moment it’s just an outline I wrote in a rush last summer.