Recently landed, with just enough time to see the cinema where her film is being shown and buy some fruit and water, the actress Kiti Mánver sits down in front of her mobile phone camera to talk about the premiere of Mamacruz at the Sundance Festival. “It’s the first time after 53 years in the profession, but I’m finally here,” she says happily, still shaken by the complicated trip to the winter resort where the prestigious event takes place, in which the trips of so many successes have begun. some of which have concluded on Oscar night itself.

For now, the response to the second fictional film by the Venezuelan Patricia Ortega, in which Mánver is the protagonist, has been lukewarm, but it is to be expected when all the attention is focused on the American competition, in which figures such as Anne participate. Hathaway, Daisy Ridley, Geena Davis, Alexander Skaasgard, and Emilia Clarke. However, Screen Daily has published a review appraising Mánver’s compelling and nuanced performance “as a religiously repressed woman who is late, in every way, to the transformative power of her own sexuality. The context may be very Spanish but the theme is universal”.

Conceived for years in Maracaibo, where director Ortega lived before emigrating first to Argentina and then to Seville, where she found funding and a perfect context to explain her story, Mamacruz tells what happens when the character played by Mánver must learn to use the internet to be able to communicate with her daughter, who has gone to live in Vienna. The expert seamstress who fixes the Modern Bed Designs of the saints for the local church and leads an opaque life with a husband of many years, she discovers porn by chance and that leads her to explore her own desires.

“This role is a gift, since few films are made with older people as protagonists,” says the actress from Habla, mudita and Mujeres al verde de un ataque de nervos, and adds: “but with the producer Olmo Figueredo I have the enormous lucky to have done two in a row. I am aware of the privilege, ”says Mánver, who will turn 70 in May and admits that she toyed with the idea of ??retiring just before the pandemic.

For his part, Ortega, whose first fiction film, I, Impossible, represented Venezuela at the Oscars, says of the actress: “I didn’t have an image in my head of who the leading lady could be, but I knew I needed a woman to that she could rejuvenate without makeup, that she had a very flexible emotional spectrum and the ability to start out looking very old only with her gestures and the movements of her body and then, when everything happens to her, she becomes younger. I wanted someone who could look simple and spontaneous like any grandmother and at the same time become someone sensual,” she explains about the role that required not only a good performance but also a dose of courage: “When I look at Mamacruz, I really appreciate her work. because he gave himself completely, I don’t see him afraid of being emotionally and physically vulnerable. I feel that Kiti is the soul of the film”.