“The Pueblo” (“the village”), she says, even though it is a town of 50,000 inhabitants. Spaniard Elena López Riera, 41, was born and raised in Orihuela, Alicante province, in a narrow city center around which stretched fields of orange and lemon trees “full of pesticides”. For El agua, his first film, in theaters on 1er mars, the sacred director “latest revelation of Spanish cinema”, by El País in the fall of 2022, returned to the land of her childhood.
The scenario features a teenage girl in love who fears being the victim of a local legend, according to which La Segura, the river which crosses the city, swallows certain women when it is in flood… Floods, Elena López Riera has some known several, one when she was 5 years old, in 1987, another on September 13, 2019, which killed six people. The director was then working on her film project.
Local teenagers
To embody this story, a sort of teen movie sprinkled with fantasy, the self-taught director, a former teacher of comparative literature, has chosen to have inhabitants of the ” village “. Only the heroine’s mother and grandmother are played by professional actresses, respectively the very fashionable Bárbara Lennie, seen in Pedro Almodóvar (The skin that lives) or Rodrigo Sorogoyen (el reino), and Nieve de Medina.
“I only showed them the script a fortnight before the shooting. » Elena López Riera, director
In 2020, Elena López Riera undertakes location scouting in Orihuela with the help of French casting director Cendrine Lapuyade. This is how they identify Alberto Olmo, a marshmallow heart under the guise of bad boy, to whom they entrust the mission of interpreting the boyfriend of the teenager, and Pascual Valero, a mason who came to accompany his daughter to the auditions, who leaves with the role of the father of the young man. But also a dozen local teenagers, responsible for camping the friends of young Ana, the main character.
“Many of them have school, legal, family, emphasizes Elena López Riera. I only showed them the script a fortnight before filming, in April 2021, so that they didn’t learn the dialogues by heart, and that they kept their spontaneity. » During the six months of preparation, she brought them together, made them dance, shout, say poetry, play basketball or cards, showed them reference films, such as To our Loves (1983), by Maurice Pialat (whose widow, Sylvie Pialat, produced El agua). “I didn’t want to make them actors capable of improvising, but to create a familiarity between them so that the camera could catch their truth, in a small gesture, a tease. The best-oiled scenario in the world cannot describe the truth of a laugh or a caress. »
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