Six years ago, Álvaro Gago (Vigo, 1986) premiered his short film Matria, with which he received countless national and international awards, such as the Grand Jury Prize at the 2018 Sundance Festival and the Goya nomination for Best Fiction Short Film in 2019. The story was based on the life of Francisca Iglesias, a woman who took care of her grandfather during the last years of his life and with whom the director has maintained a close friendship for some time. She is about an anonymous heroine who has had to deal with many financial and personal problems whose daily struggle Gago wanted to reflect in a story that was too small in the short and that he always had in mind to expand into a movie.
Shot entirely in Galician, Matria now has its world premiere at the Berlinale, within the Panorama section, where tonight it has been very well received by the public. Although Francisca herself starred in the short, for the film it is María Vázquez who gets into her skin in a younger version of the protagonist. Her Ramona is a whirlwind of a woman. A pure nerve who works cleaning whatever is necessary, always for little money, and saving for the studies of his daughter, who works in a bar with a boyfriend who is not liked by her mother.
Ramona lives in the house of her partner, a man who arrives drunk at night and with whom she doesn’t communicate much. “Francisca got along very well with María, hugged her and was happy that she told her story. And creatively she was very present during the rehearsals. I’m sure that if she had been born in another context she would be a filmmaker,” Gago comments in conversation with this newspaper. and happy to participate for the first time in the Berlinale. “The first time I saw Francisca she was displaying all her light because she entered my house like an exhalation and took my grandfather with her in the best of ways. She breathed life into him and was a very important presence in his life. My admiration was growing every day, we got to know each other and we told each other our sorrows and what struck me is that she told me that she felt very invisible, that she was not listened to and did not see stories around her that reflected anything that happened in her daily life Then I saw it clearly. I fell in love with her and her story and the only way to pay tribute to her was to make a film with her in the heart and also as a creative consultant”, she recalls about the beginning of her relationship with Francisca.
“It was almost poetic justice to make a film where all that series of unwritten rules that govern his life and that have to do with machismo and patriarchy, so emasculating and oppressive, were broken. I knew we had to walk towards a new horizon “, he assures. “And I am very attracted to her so lively and creative sense of humor, so Galician, that I castrated in the short film and I wanted to use it as a survival weapon in the film in the face of a suffocating daily routine to help build a Ramona who lowers her head less and who is less of a victim, with a strong character”.
Likewise, Gago also wanted to delve into “the influence of heteropatriarchy on mother-child relationships. The relationship between mother and daughter is intuited at the end of the short but in the film it is central. Ramona is very macho, and judges the relationship of her daughter with a boyfriend she doesn’t know. She’s repeating a series of patterns influenced by the social circumstances she’s immersed in. At first she doesn’t realize it, but luckily we’re walking towards an awakening in adulthood.”
Gago confesses that the film is not 100% faithful to Francisca’s life, but there is a lot of it. “I have allowed myself the license to take all that and make a fiction.” And the turning point in Ramona appears when she goes to work at Xosé’s house and finds a small space where she can stop for a while and suddenly it begins to open up. Until then she had preferred her “cage of comfort to the unknown”. “She becomes essential with her daughter, with Xosé, because she is afraid of dismantling herself. In addition, all her life she has heard that it is worth little and it is something that closes horizons and you do not consider another alternative ” .
María Vázquez (Quién a hierro mata, Fariña) had seen the short and never thought she could star in the film, but Gago chose her to be that Ramona fifteen years younger. She, who is from Lugo, had to deal with an accent from the Rías Baixas, and she thought that “it would be a challenge.” She says that Francisca, who reserves the role of the bar waitress in the film, has been her coach. She “helped me a lot, she has been super generous and gave me keys to build the character.”
The redheaded interpreter comments that the project came to her a year before filming and she had time to rehearse. “I have worked a lot on the physical aspect and I have left at 4 in the morning to work on the real boat and experience Ramona’s environment. And I saw that Ramona’s character came out because in this world of men there is no other. Yes they wouldn’t eat her with potatoes. She’s a typical character of women seafarers who have very hard jobs and lives and have to face a very macho world. I loved the fact that she can handle everything. She’s like a rock.” And she also mentions her sense of humor, “how she draws strength to make jokes” despite how hard her life is.
Vázquez is interested above all in the script “the fact that the character does not stop to live badly. If he stops, he sinks. He has to have a thousand shitty jobs to earn three duros. And this happens and it is important that he vindicate himself in the film. Care falls on women at all levels”. And he believes that, deep down, it is good for him that he does not stop so as not to think about what is happening to him. “This woman doesn’t know what her need is. Her daughter tells her she has her way and wants her to leave her alone. It’s a lesson for her. The daughter has a better head than Ramona thinks, but she’s afraid that he repeats his patterns.” And he adds: “The hope of the film, beyond what will become of Ramona, is that at any moment in life one can stop and rebuild. It would be easier if we had help, but at least you have to try.” Do you have anything on Ramona? “I think that I am quite incombustible too, that thing of not stopping, of being very tenacious and hardworking, even more, which is very Galician. But you have to stop, cry and rest.”
The actress, who has Honeymoon and Little Loves pending release this 2023, is applying it now after an intensive period. “I felt that I had to load myself with reality and humanity, not just filming,” she concludes. Her performance is rewarding.