12/02/2022 - BERLINALE 2022: The Basque director presents her feature debut, an intimate family drama bolstered by the excellent performances of its lead actresses

(© Dario Caruso/Cineuropa)

Lullaby [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Alauda Ruiz de Azúa
film profile], a film that was given a huge boost by the ECAM’s La Incubadora, and which is set to be released in Spanish theatres on 20 May, has just had its world premiere in the Panorama section of the Berlinale. We took the opportunity to talk to its director, Alauda Ruiz de Azúa.

Cineuropa: You’re Basque, and you have set your feature debut in Bilbao. This region in particular has a long-standing matriarchal tradition, in which mothers have much of the power… or perhaps superpowers?
Alauda Ruiz de Azúa: Mothers, no matter where they are from, always seem like they have superpowers, but yes, this is a particular figure I’ve seen in the Basque Country. Then, when you become a mother, you also unwittingly end up in the same place, as there’s a type of strong mother there, with heaps of attitude, who takes care of everything and who tends to the emotional relationships that entail care and responsibility, but not in a schmaltzy way. All of that can be seen in this film: that repressed affection, typical of the character of people from the north of Spain.

One can’t help but ask you how autobiographical the film is, or how much it incorporates other experiences that you’ve been through or that people have told you about…
The initial seed of Lullaby was autobiographical: I became a mother for the first time, and that plunges you into a kind of crisis, when your whole life suddenly changes, you turn into another person and you take on a lifelong commitment to a very vulnerable being. During that crisis, when I was looking for refuge in books and cinema, as I’ve always done, I couldn’t find a good story; that’s why my feature is a fiction fuelled by real-life stories from both male and female friends of mine, as well as my own stories, all filtered through a fictional lens. In this way, I explore the topics that I wanted to delve into.

There’s an immense level of intimacy in Lullaby, as the audience ends up feeling as if they’re inside the characters’ bedrooms, almost helping to change nappies…
That’s such a beautiful thing to say! There’s something wonderful about cinema: when it allows you to see people in all their intimacy, as if you were a fly on the wall, which we can’t do in real life, because – at best – we can only imagine what’s going on in other people’s houses… But film allows you to get up close to the solitude and to what’s going on within a family. The commitment we made was to stop the camera from being too invasive, but yes, it was very close up to the characters, in their private space. In addition, we worked hard with the actors to make this family as real as possible, with its own habits, rules and customs.

Speaking of actors, your lead actresses, Laia Costa and Susi Sánchez, do an admirable job: the former sometimes speaks Basque, even though she’s Catalonian, and the latter also previously embodied motherly conflicts in Sunday’s Illness [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ramón Salazar
film profile].
The character in Sunday’s Illness was a more sophisticated mother, but yes, you’re right. I had a gut feeling about Laia from the get-go: I saw her as a very strong person because she has a girl’s face, but at the same time, she has the energy of a woman on the verge of taking a vital step towards another destination. She is an actress who is very authentic, without letting it slide into something too intense. She’s got an element of the everyday, and I was lucky that she agreed to play the role. And Susi breathes life into a housewife, but I was fascinated by the prospect of her playing this lady because she brings a very interesting complexity to the character. She’s a woman who could have had a different life, but she stayed at home, getting by with that sense of responsibility and that intelligence that you can sense she has. The fact that Susi took on the role got me away from that clichéd image of a housewife, and I liked that a lot.

It’s clear to see in the film that, even as we get more mature, our parents will still always see us as children...
Yes, that question was always looming over us during the screenwriting process, the rehearsals and the shoot. When you are taking care of a parent, the bond is so strong that one little remark or one glance can make you feel like a child again, as you feel the same emotions as you did back then. They’re relationships that mark us forever and tell us what we’re like, and what type of mother or father we’re going to be: it’s nice to acknowledge that, and that’s the journey we embark on in the movie.

Furthermore, as has been tackled by a few other films, we always end up resembling our parents.
It’s a very common feeling when you start to approach a certain age, and although you might have thought that you were very different from your folks, suddenly, you start to recognise yourself in various things that you’ve seen in them or that they’ve said to you. It’s part of the growing process, the act of forgiving your parents and understanding them more thoroughly, because you have parts of them inside you.

(Translated from Spanish)