Just one year ago, Carlota Pereda premiered Cerdita, her acclaimed feature debut, a thriller about an overweight teenager who suffers bullying. The film won the Méliès d’Or award at the Sitges festival and now the Madrid-based director returns to the fantasy film competition with a supernatural drama, La ermita, opening in cinemas on November 17. The film stars Belén Rueda in the role of a fallen cloak medium to whom Emma, ??a girl whose mother has a terminal illness, asks for help in contacting the spirit of a girl who died in a hermitage during the Spanish plague.
It is a very different film from Cerdita. Was that what attracted you to the project?
Yes, it came to me during the pandemic when Laura Fernández, from Filmax, started watching my short films and wanted to work with me. He sent me a script that was about a man who lived in Edinburgh and was a medium. It’s based on a story where voices were said to be heard in college and a Japanese medium said it was a little girl crying because she missed her doll and that’s why people left toys. Laura decided to develop it with Carmelo Viera and Albert Bertran, and when the story came to me she contacted me in a very beastly, very emotional way, and I said I would do it if we focused on certain elements that were not so developed and if we brought the film to Spain.
There is a lot of Basque legend and mythology.
We created the legend of the birdmen and I also based it on the legend of the hermitage of Olite. And I also wanted to explore topics that interested me such as maternal-filial relationships. Right in the pandemic I thought that if I died what would happen to my daughter. He had no one to leave her with. At the same time, I experienced the same absence as Emma as a child.
How much do you believe in the paranormal?
I am an agnostic who would like to believe. That’s why I like fantasy, the genre, because it exists here and can happen.
What would you say to a young woman who wants to be a film director?
Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, which is something that happens a lot to all women. It’s that we want to make everything perfect and nothing happens to make it wrong. Mistakes are beautiful and you learn from them.
