"Thanks to music videos and advertising, I have never been in a hurry to direct films"

BarcelonaIn a hermetic and strange all-girls boarding school surrounded by walls where adults are only vaguely perceived, Atenea (Maria Schwinning) spends her days sharing fantastic stories that exude the fears and longings of a childhood crashing against puberty. This is how Mala bèstia begins, by Bàrbara Farré (Barcelona, 1994), the feature film debut of the director of music videos like Milionària by Rosalía or El relámpago by Amaia, who already showed her interest in adolescence as a confusing and contradictory territory in the short film the short film La última virgen (2017), awarded at the Gaudí Awards and the Malaga Festival. "Adolescence has always interested me because there is a kind of temporal void," says Farré. "Ceasing to be a girl to become a woman seems like a dark idea, but it can also be beautiful and we shouldn't be afraid of it, because it means you can create your own universe and discover the emotions of the person you will become."

The journey to adulthood, of course, is usually bumpy. When a couple adopts Atenea, the fear of never finding a family is replaced by a new concern: that the blood tie of a future child of the new parents will end up weighing more than the chosen affection. Ambiguous and murky, Mala bèstia sets itself apart from a significant portion of recent Catalan cinema debuts in its clear intention to move in a territory closer to fable than dramatic realism. It also has no biographical background, at least consciously. "The story came to me through intuition," explains the director. "My co-writer [Alberto Dexeus] and I were writing various situations and deciding which ones would be more interesting to explore. It was like building a puzzle. In the end, you realize that there are many things that speak of my fears and emotions, but they arrive through the unconscious."

Finding your own voice

If Mala bèstia is not a typical Catalan opera prima, Farré is also not the typical debut director. “I dedicate myself to making music videos and advertising, and thanks to that I have never been in a hurry to make cinema – she assures –. I have also not felt the need to debut early, but rather to do it well and give myself time to find my voice”. This voice, she admits, is not present in all her work as a director. “When I shot the music video for Milionària, my job was to concretize the artist's creative vision, but in other music videos like Muñequita linda by Najwa Nimri or El relámpago by Amaia I have worked with more freedom”, explains Farré, who detects a common element in these commissions. “Light and darkness always go hand in hand – she says –. It is a contrast that I like very much: filming something tragic in a very beautiful, almost precious way”. In this sense, Mala bèstia is reminiscent in its initial part of Peter Weir's cult film Picnic at Hanging Rock, a film that “fascinates” Farré for its “super beautiful, super brilliant and super dreamy aesthetic”, although at first she did not use it as a reference.

Farré's hand doesn't tremble when it comes to making brave decisions, like dragging her protagonist into very dark situations or leaving it open whether what we've just seen is reality or fiction. “The idea was not to close the story, because the protagonist's journey, which is about giving yourself value and not seeking validation from others, never ends,” she points out. Another daring move is to place the entire narrative weight on the young protagonist, the almost debutante Maria Schwinning, and leave actors as solid and experienced as Iria del Río and Roger Casamajor in a discreet second place. “I worked on the direction of the actors as if these characters were products of her imagination – Farré admits. And when we rehearsed, I told Maria to direct them, so that their interpretations would be born from the protagonist's gaze. And both Roger and Iria understood that the film belonged to Atenea and were very generous.”