While the cold has set in for some time, director Itsaso Arana invites you to take a warm seat in front of the sunny setting of her first film Girls Are Well. An intimate and touching feature film to watch at the cinema!
In the middle of summer, five young women gather in a house in the countryside to rehearse a play. Sheltered from the oppressive heat, they share their knowledge about friendship, play, love, abandonment and death, with the secret hope of becoming better. This is the idyllic setting set by the Spanish actress and director Itsaso Arana in her first film Girls are OK, to be discovered today at the cinema.
Also written by him, this luminous feature film about sorority addresses a plurality of themes that are both universal and extremely personal. Its great particularity is its quasi-documentary dimension which makes it all the more authentic and intimate. And this depends above all on the choice of actresses who carry this film. On the occasion of its theatrical release, its director spoke to our microphone.
“The first step was the choice of actresses. It was very important to me that it was these people, that they were not replaceable, that they had a real connection with the film each in who they are,” explains Itsaso Arana. What follows is a series of filmed interviews between the director and the actresses Bárbara Lennie, Irene Escolar, Itziar Manero and Helena Ezquerro, which serve as a basis for writing the screenplay.
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“Once we were on the set, this very written material, we wanted it to be completely porous and to be able to let itself be carried away by what each day of being together and playing together brought us. .” So, when Itsaso Arana learns that Bárbara is pregnant, she decides to include her in her script. A unique approach which accentuates the accuracy of the story!
THE UNION OF TWO FEMALE TANDEMS
If the choice of these four actresses is immediately so obvious for Itsaso Arana, who also plays in the film, it is because the director has already crossed paths with them during her career. She knows Itziar Manero and Helena Ezquerro, the two youngest of the group, thanks to the theater.
“They are wonderful actresses, but they also have a certain way of being in the world. They both lost their mothers when they were young and this orphan status gives them a particular posture of humility, and at the same time of great wisdom towards life, which is something that I touch and that I respect a lot in both of them.”
For their part, Bárbara Lennie (La Nina de Fuego) and Irene Escolar (Official Competition) are two more established actresses. “Their career necessarily gives them a lot of life experience since we play so many different characters, we experience so many different things. And it was interesting to see them face to face with two young girls who are really beginners in this profession, but who already have much richer life experience. They have greater wisdom and vital maturity in relation to life.
So I found it important, in this world of cinema where we are so compared and put into competition, to somehow neutralize this leveling and make their experiences completely horizontal so that they are all on the same level.”
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THE DIALOGUE AT THE HEART OF THE FILM
These life experiences, which bring such a particular dimension to the film, are precisely through sequences that scream truth, in which the actresses discuss with sincerity and without superfluity about death, motherhood or even romantic relationships, that they shine through on the screen and are offered to the spectators.
“I am certain that sharing the experience we carry within ourselves with others, of opening ourselves up, makes us better. Not only does it make us feel less alone, but I’m convinced that even if I look stupid, even if I’m falling apart, it makes me better.
That’s really what it was about communicating to the girls in the film and through the film. It’s the fact of allowing yourself this way of making yourself ridiculous among friends, of having friends in front of whom you know how to make yourself ridiculous, you know how to say that you don’t know, that you don’t know how to do or how to say the unspeakable. I believe in this word, I believe in the curative and necessary virtue of this word, and that it makes us better.”
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THE PASSION FOR THEATER
Through Girls Are Well, Itsaso Arana also demonstrates with strength and intensity his passion for theater, which is at the heart of the film and his approach. “I dared to take the step of making a film because I was going to deal with subjects that fascinate me. I gave my life to theater and cinema, these are the two sides of my creative life, so that was the basis on which I built this film, she explains.
I know that representing theater in cinema is an extremely perilous, if not impossible, mission. Despite everything, if I dared to do it, it is because I knew very quickly that the theater would only be a pretext to show the experience of life and common creation, that is what was going to interest me, this environment that this theater exercise was going to create.”
Discover Girls Are Well, a tender ode to sisterhood, sharing and life, in theaters today.