Pilar Palomero (Zaragoza, 1980) says she’s “super grateful” Malaga Festival for remembering him once again with this Málaga Talent-La Opinión de Málaga Award. Here he premiered the film The Girls, which took half his life to produce and eventually established him as an authorial voice to be reckoned with by the Spanish industry.
There are just a few hours left before the band Prensa Ibérica takes the stage at the Cervantes Theater to receive the Málaga Talent-La Opinión de Málaga Award. How are you feeling?
All this is great. Yesterday I was having dinner with my family and my nephew thought maybe they wouldn’t give it to me, he thought it was a competitive award like the Goya and I told him no, it was a different type of award, recognition… [Ríe].
Let’s take a look at all the winners of this award: Carlos Marques-Marcet, Óliver Laxe, Los Javis, Carla Simón and now you. If we group all these views, a new cinematographic paradigm emerges from our cinema, which is a reflection of what we currently see on the screens.
All of these names you read about are names that I like very much, I like what they do, their work and their approach to cinema. Of course, if there is a festival, having things in common is something that makes me very happy.
So what kind of contributions do awards actually make?
As Carla Simón said, awards help you make the next movie. It’s the answer we always give, but it’s real because it’s real. I mean, it’s great to receive these, it means support, but it’s okay not to receive them, that’s not the important thing.
The truth is that you have carved out a very important place for yourself in our cinematography: your first two films, The Girls and The Motherly, had good box office returns and excellent reviews from the specialist press.
This is very nice. It’s a unique feeling to make a film and feel that it reaches the public, that it reaches them in the way you imagined when you wrote it. Because movies are made for people to see. The biggest failure, in my opinion, was not knowing how to connect with the audience and making it seem like a movie made just for me. Then I would be wrong. For now, I feel lucky because the films I have made have reached people and this has encouraged me to continue on the path of heartfelt stories with the desire to connect with more people from there.
The Girls, The Motherly and now The Flashes, which he’s diving into. Three movies in a short time…
From the outside it looks like I did these things one after another. It’s funny to me because a lot of people say to me: “Wow, how fast!” And of course I don’t have that feeling. I know the privilege of being able to make these three films in a period of six, seven years, but I look at it differently: I have been studying and working in this industry for more than 20 years.
Spanish cinema has changed a lot in the last 30 years. First of all, thanks to the emergence of a generation of female directors of which you are a part.
I love feeling like I can be part of a group of women who make films in a certain way, with a very different way of working than what was used in previous years. But I also want to free myself from all of this when evaluating my projects; As a creative, I have to do what I truly feel. The rest, that is, looks and generations, correspond more to journalists, critics and film informants, and above all we need time to pass so that the distance is greater… Moreover, it is not only female directors who change things. . I’m excited to see the change in the team leaders as well: I studied Photography when I started working and I didn’t see women in film photography teams; However, when I studied at school, there were the same number of women as men. So clearly there was a problem there. I’m glad it changed.
And now on red carpets, boys and girls greet directors because they know who they are. We see this on the red carpet of the Malaga Festival, Malaga is very important. These small details visualize another reality.
There’s clearly a problem; I insist, while there are women studying cinema in film schools, the number of women directing is decreasing. An overdue historical restoration is taking place, and we are starting to see the fruits of what has been planted for years, thanks to supportive policies and a change in social mentality. So what he’s saying is it’s exciting, it’s seeing boys and girls wanting to take a picture with a director, but above all the most exciting thing is seeing them in theaters.