"I still can't believe it": Aina Clotet will debut as a director at the Cannes Film Festival
'Viva', the debut work of the actress and filmmaker, will premiere at Critics' Week
BarcelonaThe first film as director by actress Aina Clotet will premiere in May as part of Critics' Week, the prestigious French event that takes place parallel to the Cannes Film Festival and has been organized by the French Union of Film Critics since 1962. Viva, which is set in the near future when Catalonia is suffering from an extreme drought, stars Clotet herself as a woman who has just turned 40 and is recovering from cancer.
"Being selected for Critics' Week in Cannes with my first film as director is a dream. I still can't believe it. Three months ago, I couldn't have imagined it, it seemed impossible," Clotet explains via video call. Viva was on the Critics' Week shortlist and they only found out a few days ago that the film had been selected. "It's been weeks of horrible suffering and when they called to invite us, I almost fainted – Clotet assures –. The film has been a very long journey that started more than six years ago, and I think the intensity of the film, in which the protagonist has a great desire to conquer the world, has a lot to do with the intensity with which we have lived this process."
The film's entry on the Critics' Week states that Viva is spoken in Catalan, Spanish, English, and French, but Clotet confirms that the original version is Catalan. "There is 80% Catalan," she assures. The information provided by the distributor describes the film as "a contemporary tragicomedy that explores the desire to live, the fear of death, and the complexity of affective relationships." The protagonist, Nora, "finds herself torn between the order and security of her lifelong relationship with Tom and the unexpected appearance of Max, a young man who awakens in her a new drive for desire and freedom."
In addition to Clotet, the cast of Viva includes Naby Dakhli, Marc Soler, Loll Beltran, and Zaira Pérez in the leading roles. The director highlights Beltran's work: "Lloll plays my mother and she is wonderful and fantastic, and I am very excited that it is an actress like her, so well-known in Catalonia. And we also have Guillermo Toledo speaking in Catalan. He was very excited about it, because he had never done it before, and he lives in Badalona. He has put in significant effort to learn Catalan and speaks it very well."
Return to Cannes
It will not be the first time that Clotet participates in a Cannes festival: the series Esto no es Suecia, of which she is one of the creators, participated in 2024 in the official competition of Canneseries, the festival dedicated to series that takes place in Cannes a month before the film festival. In fact, Clotet won the award for best actress at that edition of Canneseries. Another of the creators of Esto no es Suecia was Valentina Viso, a regular screenwriter for Mar Coll, who in Viva co-wrote the film's screenplay with Clotet.
The Semaine de la Critique is a festival focused on directors' first or second films and has served to discover subsequently acclaimed filmmakers such as Wong Kar-wai, Ken Loach, Alejandro González Iñárritu, François Ozon, or Julia Ducournau (
Titane). The event programmed in 1966 the first solo film by Vicente Aranda, Fata Morgana, an emblematic title of the Barcelona School starring Teresa Gimpera. And in recent years, it has also served as an international launching pad for filmmakers such as Oliver Laxe, who triumphed there in 2016 with Mimosas; Clara Roquet, with Libertad, or Laura Ferrés with her short film Los desheredados.
