We had the opportunity to speak with the actress, screenwriter and filmmaker β a Catalan-born artist from her hometown of Barcelona β as she prepared for her trip to Cannes.
I want to see how they react, if it generates questions, debates, if people feel encouraged to share their experiences. The initial idea started about six years ago when many things came together.
I was 26 years old, involved in a performance project with a group of girls who are my friends. We were researching female sexuality, desire and working with the body. All these years were spent writing the screenplay with Clara Roquet β a very slow and challenging process. Clara, who has made many films, said it was the most difficult one she ever wrote. It has five acts to achieve this mirror game that gives it an intention but not a cause and effect.
The best description of a film, as one of the members of the Cannes selection committee commented, is that one can identify with it but there are no good or bad characters. We were clear about that from the very beginning and that was our quest. This phrase served as our statement of intent. Childhood was the easiest part because there is a lot more documentation about those processes and very few cinematic references.
Everything was still being built and we had a lot of freedom. We even considered making the film only about childhood. For adolescence and adulthood, we started conducting interviews, mainly with women but also with parents and men, asking them about their experiences, memories and their current relationship with masturbation.
