It is not uncommon for a director to visit Sitges two years in a row to present a film, perhaps even less so in a national context. But that’s what Madrid-born Carlota Pereda has achieved. After leaving the previous edition with Méliès de Oro for ‘Cerdita’, she is now giving this performance. ‘Shelter’ at the international premiere. “In fact, this new movie was almost the first movie,” Pereda explains. “‘Pig’ looked like he was going to be late and [la productora] Laura Fernández suggested this to me Screenplay: Albert Bertran Bas and Carmelo VieraSomeone I relate to a lot. In that case We were in the middle of a pandemic and I kept wondering what would happen if I died. what happens to my daughter“.
Little Emma (cute) in the movie Maia Zaitegi, an eight-year-old debutant) wants to learn to communicate with the spirit of a girl who has been trapped in the hermitage of a Basque town for centuries. To do this, he asks Carol for help (Belen Rueda), a somewhat dubious tool, but without it, in principle, Emma will never achieve her ultimate goal: to stay in touch with her sick mother after she dies.
While his groundbreaking film was a unique take on the ‘slasher’, a bloody defense against fatphobia, his new work also falls into the ‘slasher’ subgenre. ‘ghost story’For Pereda, it’s particularly interesting from a literary perspective: “I love ‘The Turn of the Screw,’ Henry Jamesor ‘The Curse of the Hill House’, by: shirley jackson. I liked literature much more than cinema. “If I didn’t have a connection to this story, maybe I wouldn’t write a story myself.”
for injured people
Far from the ‘lo-fi’ instincts of ‘Pig’, this supernatural drama was carefully filmed in a panoramic format (“characters had to appear lost in space, in place”) and appears to be aimed at all audiences, especially the most wounded. . “It was very important for me to see ‘Sullivan’s Travels’ at a time in my life when I was spending a lot of time in hospitals. Preston Sturges. I understood Some movies have special value if they are watched when you need them. I made ‘The Hermitage’ not for myself, but for people who feel hurt in situations like pandemics.“.
Most likely, the Netflix algorithm will recommend this to us a day after watching ‘The Orphanage’. Not only because of the existence of Belén Rueda, but also because of its location in the possible subdivision ‘Reparative terrorism’. “Of course I love that movie, but I didn’t want to let it be vamped by such a classic… And with the same hero!” In return he fell under her influence ‘My Neighbor Totoro’Hayao Miyazaki (“look at this”) and ‘Ouija: Origin of Evil’By Mike Flanagan.
still so lonely
Pereda is a rare example of a Spanish director with two horror features on his resume. Why aren’t there more like him? Our interviewee explains that there are several factors: “On the one hand, there are female directors who do not like this genre. On the other hand, it is difficult in general to make a film with these characteristics in Spain, but even more so.” So if you are a woman, “Today, we cannot even get close to our male colleagues on the budget. The weirder the terrorism, the harder it is to find financing.”