After the good reception of “La novia” (2015), an adaptation of “Bodas de sangre” that won two Goyas and swept the Feroz awards, the Aragonese Paula Ortiz faces these days the end of filming of “Teresa“, a film about Saint Teresa Jesus that vindicates the power of doubt and imagination.
Passionate about classic literature and in favor of traveling the less beaten paths of cinema, Ortiz sees a parallelism between the time of the Spanish nun and mystical writer, the 16th century, and the current one. “We are experiencing a profoundly baroque and contradictory moment,” she says in a telephone conversation from Jaca (Aragón).
Extreme contrasts in the social, political and cultural spheres, he points out, which even then derived from a pandemic that brought “deaths and social crises”, but also “new ways of thinking and believing”.
With Blanca Portillo in the role of the mature Teresa, Greta Fernández in the role of the young woman and Ainet Jounou (“Alcarrás”) as a girl, the film, which will be released in 2023, adapts the work by Juan Mayorga, Princess of Asturias Award for the letters 2022, “Tongue in Pieces”which in turn is inspired by the “Book of Life” of the mystical author.
With a degree in Hispanic Philology, Ortiz says that she discovered the texts of Santa Teresa in college. “Beyond the religious and spiritual question, there was a power in her pen and an extraordinary poetic tension that caused a revulsion in me,” she recalls.
When he saw the work of Mayorga, who has participated in writing the film’s script, performed, he discovered the dramatic structure that would allow him to undertake that such a “multifaceted, intense and complex” character. What Mayorga did was pose the fiction of a trial, confront Santa Teresa with the figure of an inquisitor, who will be played by Asier Etxeandía.
“This work confronts the theme of doubt and imagination as a great human tool of faith and spirituality”, underlines the director, and insists on the “overwhelming modernity” of Santa Teresa, both for her writing and for the determination with which she who, together with a group of women, founded a new order against the current of what the canons commanded.
A reform within the Church based on austerity, poverty and closure in which the filmmaker see “rebellion and freedom”.
Ortiz premiered her first feature film in 2011, “From your window to mine (2011), for which she was nominated for a Goya for best new direction. After “The Bride” she participated in two television series, “At home” and “Stories to not sleep”.
There is currently a film pending release that shot in the midst of a pandemic in Venice, an international production based on a novel by Hemingway with Josh Hutcherson and Liev Schreiber in the cast.
“I cannot avoid looking for sources in treasures of literature, there are so many surprises that they deserve a revision or a reconstruction with the film language, that pulls me a lot”, he admits.
He combines his projects with teaching, and in the fall he will once again teach scriptwriting and metanarrative classes at the University of Barcelona. “Teaching is very nutritious for me, young people force you to constantly rethink the bases of our work.”
Asked about the reform of the Film Law that is pending parliamentary processing and that for the first time will include television series, it is shown cautious but critical.
“It is very difficult to establish a diagnosis, the projects, the stories and the needs to tell explode in many places, but it is true that we are moving towards production dynamics that increasingly stifle subversive proposals.”
Paula Ortiz: “We live in a profoundly baroque and contradictory moment”