"I wouldn't have felt so much love for my mother if she hadn't gotten sick"

BarcelonaWhen director Marta Matute (Madrid, 1988) was 18 years old, her mother was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. For nine years, the whole family dedicated themselves to caring for their mother, and that degenerative disease became the center of their lives. For all practical purposes, Matute stopped being a normal girl her age. “I wanted to be with my friends, live my life, but the illness destroyed everything – she recalls –. In a way, you continue with your life, but dissociated.” Matute didn't talk to her friends about the situation and even hid it, but she already suspected that sooner or later she would end up “doing something” with that experience. And so it has been: I Will Not Die of Love, her opera prima, which arrives in cinemas this Friday after triumphing at the Malaga Festival with three awards (Golden Biznaga for best film, best actress, and best supporting actor) that position it as the first major surprise of Spanish cinema in 2026.

“With this film, I wanted to accompany people who are caring for a family member and are in this situation,” explains Matute, who in I Will Not Die of Love tries not to idealize the care or the people who provide it and to show all the colors of their emotional journey. At first, Claudia (played by Júlia Mascort) only has the normal concerns of an 18-year-old girl on her mind: going out to parties, first loves, and acting classes. As if the family tragedy had nothing to do with her, as if it were a burden that didn't belong to her. But over the years covered by the film, reality imposes itself with all its consequences: frustration, rage, isolation... and, finally, solidarity and empathy. “I lived through very hard and lonely moments, and at some point, I even treated my mother badly – explains Matute –. But there were also very beautiful moments, because the experience made us all more vulnerable”.

This is the paradox of the film: the curse that destroys family life also allows, at times, for dormant emotions to be reactivated. “We were an unloving and uncommunicative family, like the one in the movie, and it’s not that we now say ‘I love you’ all the time or hug each other, but I do feel that the experience united us forever”, reflects Matute, who points out that the everyday nature of the illness can have an unexpected effect. “Seeing the fragility of your mother, who was like a bull before, makes you connect with her like never before –she says–. I don’t know if I would have felt so much love for my mother if she hadn’t gotten sick”. The film's title, I Will Not Die of Love, comes from a day when, visiting her mother at the residence, when they no longer even spoke, Matute felt an attack of love for her like she had never felt before and, she believes, will never feel for anyone again. “When words disappear, the touch of the skin remains, and it is of a very painful beauty, but also a great learning experience that makes you mature all at once”.

The film's emotional journey is expressed on screen through the eyes of Júlia Mascort, the young Barcelona actress awarded in Málaga, who debuts in cinema with the difficult role of Claudia. “The film had a difficult tone, which could fall into melodrama, but in the castings I already realized that Júlia could do it from a restraint that was very interesting”, says Matute. For Mascort, who had worked on the series Com si fos ahir and in the play premiered at TNC La festa, the most important thing about I Will Not Die of Love was to do justice to the director's real story. “It was very important for her and I wanted to live up to it”, explains the actress, who, lacking any direct experience with the illness, resorted to feelings she had shared with the character, “from guilt to injustice or helplessness”. Throughout the process, she had an important ally in Laura Weissmahr, who plays her older sister. “Off-camera we had a very close relationship, perhaps because in real life she is the older sister and I am the younger sister, and the roles of fiction and reality merged completely”, explains Mascort, who sees Weissmahr as “a role model”.

“The last monkey of society”

Matute also highlights the acting work of Sonia Almarcha, who plays the mother with dementia, and underscores the courage of accepting a role for which there were no actresses lining up (“There are people who simply don't want to see themselves like that,” says Matute) and that the actress and director prepared by visiting centers with people with dementia in different stages and, even, the director's father, who has also ended up suffering from dementia. “I showed her photos and videos of my mother, but Sonia has also picked up many things and gestures from my father,” explains Matute.

Evidently, her personal circumstances have made her very sensitive to the vulnerability of people with degenerative diseases, whom she considers “unprotected” by the system. “There is a dependency law, yes, but there are no resources and nursing homes are not even audited reliably –she assures–. Older people and their caregivers and families are helpless.” Living the illness so closely has made her look to the future with increasing suspicion. “Older people are society's last resort, and I have a terrible fear of growing old because I know very well what nursing homes are like –she confesses–. We have a care system that is not capable of sustaining what aging entails. People of my generation who don't have children tell ourselves that we will look after each other, but it shouldn't be like that”.