Many years ago, Manuel Martín Cuenca heard the story of a girl who had sued her father because the man breached the separation agreement and would never see her children. The little girl wanted the man to come visit her. Martín Cuenca always knew that there was a film there, but he let time pass until confinement arrived and he saw the time to delve into the matter. He called Lola Mayo and together they wrote the script for the emotional El amor de Andrea, which participates in the official section of the Seminci.
Andrea is a 15-year-old teenager from Cádiz who lives with her mother and her two little brothers, Tomás and Fidel. The girl takes care of taking the children to school, picking them up, doing their homework with them, giving them dinner and putting them to sleep. Her mother works late. He doesn’t know anything about her father. The man left them a long time ago. She now lives with another family and, although a visitation regime was agreed upon during the separation, he never goes to see her children.
“I think my father doesn’t love us,” Andrea confesses to her best friend. “How can he not love you if he is your father?” the boy answers. Encouraged by this idea and not without difficulty, the girl takes legal action against her parent in order to force her to comply with the provisions of the divorce agreement. Are there parents who don’t love their children? “There are fathers, and also mothers, who do not love their children. There are even those who pretend to love them, but they cannot or do not know how. That is what happens to Andrea’s father, who is not violent, nor abusive, nor does he seem bad person, but he is incapable of establishing an emotional bond with his children,” explains Martín Cuenca in an interview with La Vanguardia during his time at the Valladolid Festival.
For the filmmaker, “the family name, the one that appears on the DNI, means nothing. The idea that parents have unconditional love for their children is purely social because that is not always the case. What The Love of Andrea is that it is not worth demanding the affection of someone who does not want to give it to you and also that the true family is among the people who truly love you beyond the biological.
Martín Cuenca is from Almería and chose Cádiz as the setting for the film because he wants to “empower what is Andalusian” and because “the city becomes one of the protagonists of the film” along with the children Lupe Mateo Barredo (Andrea), Fidel Sierra (Fidel ) and Cayetano Rodríguez (Tomás). The director carried out a casting that lasted more than a year in search of the ideal performers: “I saw all the tests, more than 5,000, to choose the actors and then I worked a lot with them on the origin of the characters, the links between them and the separation from the father in improvisation exercises that have been very useful for the final result of the film.”
They say that directors who work with children and animals usually find themselves in an unwanted garden, but for Martín Cuenca, who has just become a father, the children in El amor de Andrea were not a complication but quite the opposite: “I had never worked with children , but in this filming I discovered two things, that I love playing with them and that I have patience. It was very nice,” concludes the director.
