Seville has been warming up for days. The city has hosted exhibitions, concerts, round tables and screenings of the films nominated for the Goya so that the public arrives more than prepared for the quintessential Spanish film awards gala, which will be delivered tonight in the Andalusian capital.
Antonio de la Torre and Clara Lago will be in charge of conducting a show that is presented as close because, although As bestas, by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, starts as a favourite, 2022 has been a great year for Spanish cinema. An exercise that started in February with the victory of Carla Simón and her endearing Alcarràs at the Berlin Festival. Simón won the Golden Bear with the story of the Solé family, who for years have cultivated peach and now faces the last harvest after losing their land.
Also at the Berlinale last year, in the Panorama section, Cinco lobitos, the debut feature by Alauda Ruiz de Azúa, premiered, a film that demystifies motherhood and in which its female leads, Laia Costa and Susi Sánchez, shine. And from Berlin to San Sebastián, where last September the other two films that now aspire to the Goya for best film competed: Modelo?77 by Alberto Rodríguez, a film about Franco’s prisons and the transition shot in the Barcelona prison, and La maternal, by Pilar Palomera, a drama that addresses adolescent motherhood.
Sorogoyen, Simón, Rodríguez and Palomera are also competing for the Goya for Best Director. The fifth opponent in this section is Carlos Vermut, for Mantícora, a film that explores the delicate issue of pedophilia. Ruiz de Azúa is nominated in the category of best new director, where she competes with Carlota Pereda, director of Cerdita, a slasher where bullying among adolescents is denounced; Elena López Riera, for El agua, a film that navigates between the magical and the earthly; Mikel Gurrea, who has directed Suro, where he explains the crisis of a couple who settles in the Empordà to dedicate themselves to the collection of cork, and the actor Juan Diego Botto, who has made his debut as a director with On the Margins, a film by social denunciation carried out by Penelope Cruz.
Cruz is accompanied in that film by Luis Tosar, who is nominated for a Goya for best leading actor. An award that Denis Ménochet, the French actor who faces his terrible neighbors, the Anta brothers, can snatch from him in As bestas. Miguel Herrán plays a young man who goes to prison in the 1970s in Modelo 77. There he finds in Javier Gutiérrez, who already has a lot of prison behind him, a kind of mentor. Both are nominated in this category. The last competitor is Nacho Sánchez, the tormented protagonist of Mantícora.
Marina Foïs plays Ménochet’s wife in As bestas, a woman who does not give up and devotes herself to the search for her missing husband. Foïs is competing for the Goya for best leading actress. But the award already has a clear favorite of hers, Laia Costa, for her interpretation of that non-perfect mother in Cinco lobitos.
The work of Vicky Luengo has also been very well received as the young woman who has not quite adapted to her new life in the countryside in Suro, and that of Anna Castillo, the girl who goes through several toxic relationships in Wild Sunflowers, the latest film by Jamie Rosales. She completes the Bárbara Lennie quintet, star of God’s Crooked Lines, Oriol Paulo’s adaptation of Torcuato Luca de Tena’s novel.
Tonight, after the long gala in which artists such as Manuel Carrasco, Pablo López or Natalia Lafourcade will perform, the Goya stars will party. And they will do it calmly because the organization has implemented a protocol to avoid sexual harassment as a result of the controversy of the Feroz awards.
