Lola has never wanted to be a mother. She has talked about it a lot with Bruno, her partner, who agrees with it. Coexistence goes from strength to strength until, after 40, she unexpectedly becomes pregnant. She decides to have an abortion, but at her clinic they tell her that she has to wait three days to make a final decision. During that time, Lola rethinks many things.
Liliana Torres directs Mamiera, a film with María Rodríguez Soto in the role of Lola and Enric Auquer in that of Bruno, which hits Spanish screens today and delves into the situation of women who do not feel the desire to be mothers like It happens to the director herself, who also signs the film’s script.
“Most people want to have children, so Lola feels strange and wonders why she doesn’t have that need. She doesn’t find an answer and deep down that’s fine,” explains Torres in an interview with La Vanguardia. Deep down inside of her, Lola knows that she will be happier if she doesn’t have children. Which she contrasts with one of her best friends, who undergoes fertility treatments without success and feels terribly melancholic.
But neither her friend nor her mother can explain to Lola in detail where this desire to have children comes from: “Lola’s mother does not have a conclusive answer. The mothers of that generation did not sit down and think about whether they wanted to be mothers or not, it was automatic, it was normal.”
Torres adds that “the majority of women of that time who could not have children felt tremendously frustrated and unhappy.” The director believes that things have changed and that “an infertile woman is no longer considered less sexy, less attractive or incomplete.”
However, she points out that “social pressure in favor of motherhood is still very powerful and there is a current that stigmatizes women who do not want to be mothers; it seems that motherhood is the maximum development of a woman. We live in a pronatalist society and women who do not want to have children move away from that conventional path and in some way we are challenging the system,” concludes the director.
