After the good reception of Girlfriend (2015), an adaptation of Blood Wedding who 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 of Jesus that claims the power of doubt and imagination.
Passionate about classic literature and in favor of traveling the less traveled 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 living in a profoundly baroque and contradictory moment,” she says from Jaca. Extreme contrasts in the social, political and cultural spheres, she points out, which even then derived from a pandemic that brought about “deaths and social crises”, but also “new ways of thinking and believing”.
With White Portillo in the role of mature Teresa, Greta Fernandez in the young and Ainet Jonou (Alcarràs) as a child, the film, which will be released in 2023, adapts the work of Juan Mayorga, Princess of Asturias Award for Letters 2022, La lengua en pieces, which in turn is inspired by the mystical author’s Book of Life. 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 his pen and a poetic tension extraordinary events that caused a revulsion in me”, he 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 portray such a “multifaceted, intense and complex” character. What Mayorga did was pose the fiction of a trial, confront Santa Teresa with the figure of a 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 reformation within the Church based on the austerity, poverty and closure in which the filmmaker sees “rebellion and freedom”.
“I look for inspiration in treasures of literature. In books you run into many surprises,” says Ortiz
When he presented the work in Seville, in 2012, Mayorga explained that rereading the texts of the founder of the Discalced Carmelite nuns, he found “a wild, untamed word. It has wonderful phrases; he speaks, for example, of women like butterflies loaded with chains, an expression that an avant-garde poet would have been proud of”. Moved by the beauty of his writings, Mayorga thought that the conversion into dramaturgy “could be interesting for the viewer, if she was played by an actress who gave her depth and breadth”, also for a character “who dares to say no even if that compromises her; that instead of wrinkling, she fights. Her spirituality borders on heterodoxy, and she is an intelligent woman, which always, and more so in the sixteenth century, is suspicious in the eyes of some “.
Ortiz released his first feature film in 2011, From your window to mine for which she was nominated for a Goya for Best New Director. After Girlfriend participated in two television series, At home and Stories to not sleep.
Currently, a film that was shot in the midst of a pandemic in Venice is pending release, an international production based on a novel by Hemingway with Josh Hutcherson and Lev Schreiber in the cast. “I can’t help but look for sources in treasures of literature, there are so many surprises that deserve a review or a reconstruction with the language of cinema, which draws me a lot,” she 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 permanently rethink of the foundations of our work”.
