Aina Clotet will debut as director in Cannes
'Viva', his 'opera prima', will premiere at Critics' Week
BarcelonaThe first film as a director by actress Aina Clotet will premiere in May as part of the Semaine de la Critique, the prestigious French event that takes place parallel to the Cannes Film Festival and has been organized by the French Union of Cinema Critics since 1962. Viva, which is set in a near future marked by extreme drought, stars Clotet herself in the role of a woman who has just turned 40 and is recovering from cancer.
As the director explained a few months ago, the project was born out of the need to explore "the fear of death" and "dependence in relationships, especially in romantic love." After overcoming cancer, Nora "throws herself into living intensely, but so much life, so much light, can also blind and burn," assures Clotet. "The sun should never be looked at directly."
It will not be the first time that Clotet participates in the Cannes Film Festival: the series This is not Sweden, 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.
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 Vicente Aranda's first solo film in 1966, Fata Morgana, an emblematic title of the Barcelona School starring Teresa Gimpera. And in recent years, it has also served as an international launch platform 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.