Women are also the future: women directors in recent Spanish cinema.

Prior to the 1980s there had been, in the history of Spanish cinema, only a few women directors, such as Rosario Pi (1899-1967), Ana Mariscal (1921-1995), or Margarita Aleixandre (1923). The 1980s saw the rise of a first important nucleus of women directors, led by Pilar Miro and Josefina Molina, who had begun directing films some years previously and whose professional trajectories overlapped for a considerable period of time.

Pilar Miro

Miro was born in Madrid in 1940. After abandoning the law studies her family had mandated, she then studied simultaneously both journalism and cinema, specializing in screenwriting and becoming the first female graduate of the Escuela Oficial de Cinematografia in Madrid. Before graduating she had already begun to work for Television Espanola, at the time Spain's sole television operation, one that the Franco regime controlled with an iron fist. Her persistent efforts to work as a television director scandalized many of Television Espanola's managers, who believed that directing was not an appropriate activity for a woman. On television she was able to direct a large number of dramatic programs and literary adaptations. In 1975 she made her cinematic debut with the feature La peticion, which was based on a short story by Emile Zola. The film provoked a huge controversy because of the relative frankness of certain sex scenes and, especially, because of the calculating and merciless character of the female protagonist: a woman who seduces a bumpkin in order to help her dispose of her lover's corpse, and who then kills the bumpkin in order to many yet a third man--this one from a better social class.

Her second film, El crimen de Cuenca (1979), re-created a real case of judicial error that had occurred in 1910. In the historical case, two accused men admitted a murder they had not committed because they were subjected to brutal torture ordered by judges, wealthy landowners, and even representatives of the Catholic Church. The film was confiscated, even though in Spain at that time censorship did not officially exist; and Miro was tried before a military tribunal on charges of having slandered the Civil Guard. Then, at this difficult moment, came the coup d'etat attempt of February 23, 1981, led by sectors of the Civil Guard itself. These dramatic circumstances prevented the film from being adequately evaluated, and it remained stigmatized as a piece de scandale, even though it was splen-did and enjoyed a great box-office success when it could finally be premiered. Finally the director was absolved, just as the two protagonists of the historical case had been. But after this, nothing would ever again be the same for Miro.

In 1981 Pilar Miro finally succeeded in bringing to the screen a fictionalization partially based on her own life: Gary Cooper, que estas en los cielos.... The plot of this film concerns a female television director who reflects upon the meaning of her existence and her relations with others when she learns that she is suffering from a serious illness and must undergo life-or-death surgery. In fact, the director had just previously undergone a heart operation; years later she would again be operated on for this condition and would die from it in October 1997.

At the end of 1982, after the electoral victory of the Socialist Party, Pilar Miro was named General Director of Cinema in the first administration of President Felipe Gonzalez. In this position she campaigned intensely and contentiously in order to establish a solid foundation for policies to protect Spanish cinema and to anticipate the norms that were to be imposed shortly afterwards within the framework of the European Union. But her efforts remained unfinished when Miro resigned voluntarily from the post in order to direct an updated version of Goethe's Werther (1986) into which she injected many of her personal, ideological, and emotional obsessions and experiences.

Surprisingly, Pilar Miro afterwards accepted a new political post. She became Director General of Radiotelevision Espanola when that agency was at the center of myriad debates as much for its determinative influence over Spanish society as for the coming legalization of private television. In this case, too, her administration became very polemical and she was personally tried in court. Consequently she was forced to resign, even though she would again be absolved at a later date.

After leaving public life, Pilar Miro directed four other features: Beltenebros (1990), a magnificent adaptation of the Antonio Munoz Molina novel and a film which won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Festival; the intimate El pajaro de la felicidad (1993), a reflection of her own disenchantment with life's circumstances; El perro del hortelano (1996), a dazzling and commercially successful version of the classical play in verse by Lope de Vega; and Tu nombre envenena mis suenos (1996), a discreet adaptation of the novel by the politician Joaquin Leguina, which recounts a complex case of feminine revenge in the post-Spanish Civil War period.

Owing both to the importance of her creative work and to her public activities in defense of Spanish cinema, one can say that Pilar Miro has been the most influential woman in its history.

Josefina Molina

Josefina Molina was born in Cordoba in 1936. After working in the theatre, and as a critic, she then attended the aforementioned Escuela Oficial de Cinematografia in Madrid, where she became the first woman to officially obtain a degree in directing. She has enjoyed an extensive career as a director for television. Her first feature film, Vera, bill cuento cruel, based on a story by Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, is from 1973. In 1981 she made a film which is fundamental in the evolution of recent Spanish cinema: Funcion de noche, which had as its point of departure a real event that took place during a theatrical presentation of Miguel Delibes' Cinco horas con Mario. During that performance lead actress Lola Herrera fainted on stage. This event led Molina to investigate the thespian's private life. Molina organized and filmed meetings and discussions with Herrera's former husband. This material yielded a unique and brillant example of combining reality and the representation of reality within the limits of the consciously 'reconstructed' documentary format. The film revealed many decisive aspects of Spain's daily life at that time; its depiction of the situation of women in Spain during the Franco years, as well as of the difficulties and ideological conditioning that weighed on married couples during that period, was especially startling.

Seven years later--after having garnered great success in television with the splendid series El camino (1977), based on the Delibes novel, and Teresa de Jesus (1983)--Josefina Molina returned to the cinema with Esquilache (1988), based on the Antonio Buero Vallejo work, Un sonador para un pueblo. Esquilache is a lucid reexamination of one of the most interesting moments in Spanish history--the attempts at modernization undertaken by King Carlos III in the middle of the eighteenth century and the vast array of obstacles which he had to confront. Esquilache also alludes to the no less conflicted contemporary period, a time when Spain was beginning to experience the first symptoms of disenchantment following the high hopes raised by the coming to power of a theoretically leftist party. Thus, the film is regarded as a model of historical cinema intelligently applied to the present time.

In 1990, Josefina Molina returned to the problems of the couple in contemporary Spanish society, this time in the form of "pure fiction": Lo rods natural is the story of a lovers' triangle, played by the actress Charo Lopez, the singer Miguel Bose, and the French actor Patrick Bouchau. Afterwards, the director dared to prepare a new adaptation of La Lola se va a los puertos (1993), a very well-known Spanish theatrical work written in 1929 by the Brothers Manuel and Antonio Machado. For a long time this work had been interpreted in populist terms as an expression of the most stale and macho cliches associated with the region of Andalucia. By casting the well-known singer Rocio Jurado, Molina sought to reread the text in a very different register, both contemporary and critical, which she considered more appropriate to the true meaning of the original.

Molina achieved another important success on television in 1997 with the series Entre naranjos, an adaptation of Vicente Blasco Ibanez's vast novel of the same name. Around that time, the filmaker began developing an interesting literary career with the publication of three novels, Cuestion de azar (1997), En el umbral de la hoguera (1998), and Los papeles de Becquer (2000). She also wrote a first-person description of her personal and creative trajectory in the excellent autobiographical essay Sentada en un rincon (A Woman Seated in the Corner), which was published in 2000 by the Valladolid International Film Festival.

Recently Molina has returned to directing--including documentaries for television and new theatrical productions of Cinco horas con Mario and of Francisco Delicado's classic La lozana andaluza as reinterpreted by the poet Rafael Alberti. She has also finished a film script entitled La cerilla, which is based on the text of Carlos Castilla de Pino, a well-know psychiatrist from Cordoba.

Other Women Directors of the 1980s

Cecilia Bartolome was born in Alicante in 1943 but spent a good part of her childhood and adolescence in Equatorial Guinea while it was still a Spanish colony. Although she obtained a degree in directing from the Official Cinema School in the mid-1960s and her first feature (Vamonos, Barbara) dates from 1977, she can nonetheless be considered a part of this nucleus of women producing films in the 1980s. In 1980 she codirected, with her brother lose Juan, a diptych entitled Despues de.... The two parts of this film, No se os puede dejar solos and Atado y bien atado, constitute an interesting reexamination of the last days of the Franco regime and its unraveling at the time when democracy was being won.

Her film career has been irregular, since she has dedicated her time to screenwriting and directing newscasts, documentaries, and commercials. In 1996 she returned to the big screen with Lejos de Africa (Far from Africa), in which she examined in somewhat autobiographical terms her childhood experience in Guinea.

Somewhat later, but still during the 1980s, the following women directed their first films: Pilar Tavora (Nanas de espinas, 1983; Yerma, 1998); Cristina Andreu (Brumal, 1988); and Ana Diez (Ander eta Yul, 1988). With the exception of Diez--who has gone on to direct Todo esta oscuro (1997), La Maria en La Habana (2000), Algunas chicas doblan las piernas cuando hablan (2001) and Galindez (2002)--the careers of these women were either prematurely cut short or became very intermittent, failing to live up to the expectations raised by their initial efforts.

The Boom of the 1990s

The 1990s marked the real boom of female directors in Spanish cinema, although the percentage of women in the industry was still relatively low, given the continuing predominance of machismo there. The critic Carlos F. Heredero, editor of the book La mitad del cielo: Directoras espanolas de los anos 90 (1998), notes in his introduction that a total of twenty-eight women began directing feature films in that decade. However, Heredero underscores the fact that those women represented only 18.6% of the total of all new Spanish directors during those same years.

Among this group several women stand out. Chus Gutierrez studied cinema in New York and has directed five features to date: Sublet (1992), Sexo oral (1994), Alma gitana (1995), Insomnio (1997), and Poniente (2002). Isabel Coixet's origins in advertising can be seen in the progressively pared-down visual style of the four features she has directed thus far: Demasiado viejo para morir joven (1988), Cosas que nunca te dije (1996), A los que aman (1998), and Mi vida sin mi (2002). The last mentioned film, which was shot in Canada, created quite a stir in the last edition of the Berlin Festival. Gracia Querejeta, daughter of Elias Querejeta (the most distinguished producer in Spanish cinema since the 1960s), began in documentary filmmaking and then had her fiction feature debut in 1992 with Una estacion de paso. More recently she has filmed El ultimo viaje de Robert Rylands (1996), Cuando vuelvas a mi lado (1999), and Hector (2003).

Additionally, we must note the work of other women directors who have made at least two feature films: Rosa Verges (Boom, boom, 1990; Souvenir, 1994; Tic, tag 1997); Maite Ruiz de Austri, a specialist in animation (La leyenda del viento del norte, 1993; [??] Que vecinos tan animales!, 1997; El sueito del unicornio, 2001); Azucena Rodriguez (Entre rojas, 1995; Puede ser divertido, 1997); Marta Balletbo (Costa Brava, 1995; [??] Carino, he enviado a los hombres a la luna!, 1998); DuMa Ayaso (Perdona bonita, pero Lucas me queria a mi, 1996, codirected with Felix Sabroso; El grito en el cielo, 1997; Descongelate, 2003); Eva Lesmes (Port tin hombre en tu vida, 1996; Elpalo, 2001), Monica Laguna (Tengo una casa, 1996; Juego de Luna, 2001); Yolanda Garcia Serrano (Amor de hombre, 1997; Kin. O, 2000); Maria Ripoll (Lluvia en los zapatos, 1997; Tortilla Soup, 2001; Utopia, 2003); Manane Rodriguez, born in Uruguay but based in Spain since 1977 (Retrato de mujer con hombre al fondo, 1997; Los pasos perdidos, 2001); the actresses Laura Maria (Sexo por compasion, 2000; Palabras encadenadas, 2003); Ana Belen (Como ser mujer y no morir en el intento, 1991); and Mireia Ros (La Monos, 1995).

Because of space limitations, I am unable to discuss in detail either the aforementioned works or the works of so many other women directors who made a first feature in the 1990s, such as Judith Colell, Daniela Fejerman, Isabel Gardela, Angeles Gonzalez Sinde, Eugenia Kleber, Maria Miro, Ines Paris, Dolores Payas, Pilar Sueiro, Helena Taberna, Mar Targarona, Nuria Villazan. Many of these last mentioned filmmakers are still active today. Let us now turn our attention to two singular figures whose careers and filmographies up to the present indicate that we are dealing with fully mature auteurs who are particularly representative of contemporary Spanish cinema: Iciar Bollain and Patricia Ferreira. Both, to date, have directed two fiction features.

Iciar Bollain

Iciar Bollain was born in Madrid. She began her work in cinema at the age of fourteen when the filmmaker Victor Erice cast her as the protagonist of one of his most important films, El sur (1983). Since then, she has acted in fourteen films. In 1993, she began to direct shorts. In 1995, she made her first feature film, Hola, [??]estas sola?, a story of two young girls from the interior of the country who, dreaming of finding an earthly paradise, undertake a long trip towards the sea. During their journey they learn how to survive sometimes very painful experiences caused by the types of human relationships characteristic of contemporary Spanish society. This film was extraordinarily fresh in terms of its language and its exposition; it was also very well filmed and produced. It achieved a remarkable success with the audience which today most frequents Spanish cinemas--the very young audience.

Bollain returned to the screen as an actress with an outstanding and nuanced performance in the film by the British director Ken Loach, Land and Freedom, which is set during the Spanish Civil War. Her contact with this director allowed her to undertake a very different kind of project: writing and publishing, in 19%, the book Ken Loach: Un observador solidario. This book is a splendid diary of the filming of Loach's Carla's Song (1996), set in Nicaragua. In this diary the actress-director-writer records some very interesting reflections on her work.

In 1999, Iciar Bollain undertook a new feature film project with the collaboration of the author Julio Llamazares as co-screenwriter. Flores de otro mundo deals with the situation of female Latin American immigrants in Spain. Bollain's film lucidly contrasts the women's situation with that of the bachelors in a remote town in Spain's interior. These men are also seeking to marry, although their motivation differs greatly from that of the immigrant women. This somber film, devoid of artificial pretensions, is directed with equal doses of maturity and humor. Thus, it represents the best of Spanish cinema at this time. In addition, it indirectly chronicles one of contemporary Spain's most pressing social problems. Flores tie otto mundo was well received by Spanish audiences, and it earned distinctions such as the prize at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival's Semaine de la Critique.

This production experience gave rise to another book, Cine y literatura: Reflexiones a partir de "Flores de otro mundo," written in collaboration with Julio Llamazares. In this volume, which also contains the script, the filmmaker clearly sets forth her perspectives concerning creativity in cinema. In addition, Iciar Bollain is one of only a few filmmakers--men or women--who, after reaping success with feature films, are willing to return to the short film genre when the nature of the story to be told or the production circumstances require it. In 2000 she directed the twenty-two-minute Amores que matan, in which she takes up the prickly subject of physical domestic violence against women. In this short, she suggests with subtle irony an innovative proposal: the creation of reeducation centers for abusive men. This social problem has become an authentic plague in contemporary Spain; although, probably, it is not that domestic violence has increased, but rather that there are now more and more women who dare to openly denounce the abuse to which they are subjected. This same theme serves as the point of departure for Bollain's third feature film, now in postproduction, Te doy mis ojos. This film deals with the social pressures that confront a woman who has decided to leave the husband who abuses her.

Patricia Ferreira

Patricia Ferreira initially worked in film criticism, and especially in television, where she had an active career making documentaries. She directed her first feature film, Se quien eres, in 2000. The plot of this work concerns a middle-aged man's strange case of amnesia and his relationship with the young female doctor who takes cares of him and who attempts to discover what his illness hides. Such a story allows the director to adopt a cool-headed approach towards a particularly turbulent recent period in Spanish history, the so-called 'political transition' during the 1970s and 1980s, when Spain was moving from the Franco dictatorship to democracy. These years were marked by several violent attacks perpetrated by the ultra-right, which it then blamed on the left in an effort to increase social tensions. Patricia Ferreira effectively recalls this historical period, which Spanish society has, in effect, 'forgotten.' Her desire to be a "witness," however, does not prevent her from creating dramatically well developed characters (perfectly interpreted by Ana Fernandez and the Argentine actor Miguel Angel Sola) and a solid, realistic intrigue reminiscent of classical films.

Her second feature, El alquimista impaciente, premiered very successfully in 2002. In it, we see the same desire to indirectly portray contemporary Spanish reality in a fictional framework, although now the approach is nearer to film noir. In her adaptation of the homonymous novel--written by Lorenzo Silva and winner of an important literary prize--the director follows the adventures of a pair of Civil Guard detectives, a man and a woman, who must clear up the death of an engineer at a nuclear plant. The engineer has turned up murdered in a motel in strange circumstances tinged with sexual overtones. The dangerous search carried out by the two young protagonists as they meet with the engineer's widow, his professional colleagues, and various judges; the presence of more-or-less clean big business deals; and various low-life locales these all combine to present a disquieting panorama of today's Spain, which seems dominated by a desire to get rich at any cost, even to the point of corrupting businesspersons and public officials. What once again characterizes Ferreira's film work here--in addition to her sharp sense of narration and visual composition is that this reflection of reality is not simply imposed mechanically onto the plot. Rather, it is decisively enriched through the characters' development. The principal characters, whose unique relationship is created with great subtlety, are effectively portrayed by Ingrid Rubio and Roberto Enriquez; and the secondary characters constitute a splendid gallery of human types. Currently, Ferreira is developing two of her own scripts; she prefers not to discuss them until production possibilities have been firmed up.

Impossible to Classify

Faced with such a variety of names, styles, and career paths, it is not possible to adequately synthesize in a few sentences the significance of the cinema produced by women in today's Spain. Nor should we insist on identifying themes, emphases, or approaches that might be considered 'feminine.' The immense majority of women directors agree that they do not make up a homogeneous group, nor a concrete tendency, and they certainly do not produce a specific 'genre' of cinema. To the contrary, these women affirm that they are just as much filmmakers as are their male counter-parts; that they are on an equal footing and not distinguished a priori as women. Nonetheless, they do frequently recognize that they have encountered more difficulty than their male colleagues in getting into film directing.

For example, the always polemical and combative Pilar Miro stated twenty-five years ago, when the label of a certain kind of fashionable feminism might have favored her image: "I don't think about cinema from the viewpoint of a woman; I think about it from the viewpoint of a director. I'm not interested specifically in telling women's stories, although I do not reject them; what interests me is to tell stories. The image I create of women may be different than the images created by men; but I don't do this on purpose. That's just how things turn out. What is quite clear for me is that I do not begin with predetermined women's issues in mind: people are what interest me."

Josefina Molina--less outspoken but just as firm in her convictions--writes in her autobiographical text previously cited: "I will not spend much time or space here referring to the difficulties that women of my generation have faced in order to take on the kinds of jobs normally carried out by men. At times I place more emphasis on my being a woman than on my being a filmmaker; and I think that the only merit in my life story is having been a woman born during the Civil War who, against all odds, did everything possible to break through an implacable inertia and dedicate herself to what she truly wanted to do.... I have not been alone, fortunately; and I will not be alone in the future. Now there are many women who assert their ideas and their world views in contemporary cinema, even though recognition of these women's talents and contributions is still skimpy. In general, I notice that the works of women directors are less appreciated and that our efforts at experimentation get cut less slack. We are even ignored and our efforts nullified, even though occasionally the opposite might appear to be true."

Iciar Bollain, in her characteristically provocative manner, affirms in her brief essay significantly titled "Cine con tetas:" "The difference between men and women is that they are men and we are women, basically. They have a tail, and we don't. We have tits, and they don't. We also have a more defined waistline, and they have less of a butt (some of them).... Does one edit a sequence differently because one has a tail? What does a sound track have to do with a waist?.... These are metaphysical doubts, because, as everybody knows, it is not the same to sit down with a pair of nuts between one's legs than it is to seat oneself without that pair of nuts--whether one is sitting down in front of a Moviola or sitting down in the Congress of Deputies. That's how it is. Whenever it's time to make films, doubts arise. In reality, the doubts appear when they see our tits, I mean when they see that we are women directors; because when they see a tail on somebody, I mean male directors, nobody asks anything about anything."

As for Patricia Ferreira, she was both thoughtful and discreet when she expressed her points of view during the Second Encounter of New Authors at the 2000 Semana Internacional de Cine de Valladolid: "I always skip on the question of whether it is more difficult for women to direct films. Above all, because answering it would entail telling my whole life's story; and in fact, if pressed further, I really couldn't answer without going into historical detail.... But today I will dare answer it, with just a few words: yes, it is more difficult. Yes, a woman finds more obstacles in her way.... I would dare say that twenty years ago it was easier. At that time, there were so few women in my profession that they always considered you a curiosity, an oddity, you were someone who was tolerated--a demonstration of their liberal character. Now we've gone from being curiosities to being the competition. And that's as far as we have been able to get. Perhaps this just means that everything continues more or less as before."

Facing a Difficult Future

We will not engage here in a discussion of all these statements, which are in basic agreement. The very good news for Spanish cinema is this appearance of a notable but still insufficient number of women directors--a considerable number of whom are also auteurs with their own universe and their own style, which is perfectly identifiable not as 'feminine' but rather as genuinely creative. It is even more significant at the present time when the nation's film industry is torn between ongoing economic and social integration into the European Union (hopefully without losing its own cultural identity) and the life-or-death struggle to survive as an industry when faced with the steamrolling financial and commercial domination of U.S. cinema. If a Spanish (or Italian, or German, etc.) cinema can continue to exist in the new European orbit, and if auteur cinema (that excels in showing a society's peculiarities, ideas, aspirations, and forms of entertainment) can continue to be made, they will unavoidably have to be created by individuals, men and women, without discriminating by gender. Translated by Dennis West and Joan M. West

Basic Bibliography

I. Bollain and J. Llamazares. Cine y literatura: Reflexiones a partir de 'Flores de otro mundo'. Ed. Paginas de Espuma, Madrid, 2000.

L Bollain. Ken Loach: Un observador solidario. Ed. El Pais/Aguilar, Madrid, 1996.

C.F. Heredero. Espejo de miradas: Entrevistas con nuevos directores del cine espanal de los anos noventa. Festival de Cine de Alcala de Henares, 1997.

C.F. Heredero (ed.). La mitad del cielo: Directoras espanolas de los anos 90. Festival de Cine Espanol de Malaga, 1998.

J. Molina. Sentada en un rincon. Semana International de Cine de Valladolid, 2000.

J.A. Perez Millan. Pilar Miro, directora de cine. Semana International de Cine de Valladolid, 1992.

Nueve directoras actuales. "II Encuentro de Nuevos Autores". Semana International de Cine de Valladolid 2001.