30/09/2024 - The Basque filmmaker presents her first series, which once again investigates the ins and outs of family, along with its complexities, private moments, doubts and grey areas

(© Dario Caruso/Cineuropa)

Querer [+see also:
series review
trailer
interview: Alauda Ruiz de Azúa
series profile] is a Movistar Plus+ original series that has been premiered out of competition at the 72nd San Sebastián Film Festival. We spoke to Alauda Ruiz de Azúa, who won a Goya Award for her feature debut, Lullaby [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Alauda Ruiz de Azúa
film profile], about Querer’s development, complexity and subject matter.

Cineuropa: How have you evolved as a director between helming your feature debut and making this series?
Alauda Ruíz de Azúa: Lullaby was an intuitive, visceral project that was born of the need to express something. Its subsequent journey and warm welcome caught me by surprise and was fantastic. But starting off with such a personal film gave me some hints that helped me establish my approach. Along the way, I stumbled into the Netflix film Love at First Kiss, which came from a different place – one of learning and bringing a script written by someone else to the screen. Querer is a return to that initial, more personal realm: to family and the dilemmas that are so hard to solve – in other words, real-life ones for which there is no correct answer, as it seems like there are two opposing forces pulling on a person. Besides that, with the series also came the desire to talk about sexual consent in the context of a married couple – an uncharted, complicated terrain full of grey areas.

The topic of abuse is being addressed quite often in fiction, such as in Icíar Bollaín’s film I Am Nevenka [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Icíar Bollaín
film profile], which is also taking part in the festival. You are both tackling a social reality head on.
It was harder to talk about it when it belonged to the more intimate realm, with its myriad complex issues. What happens in Querer is difficult to pass judgement on, and that’s what’s interesting.

Sometimes, certain violent attitudes are normalised in families, aren’t they?
There’s another topic I wanted to explore in the series: how tolerant we are of violence. We are capable of detecting violence, but we tolerate so many things.

And in the case of possessive masculinity, it can reach highly toxic levels…
Family is like a lottery – you grow up within it, and as a child, you gradually learn who it’s made up of. Initially, we think so many things are normal, but as you grow into an adult, you begin to question who these people you’ve been brought up with and have grown up with are, as well as everything you have ended up inheriting from them. The emotional education that one receives is strongly linked to how one will go on to form sexual relationships with someone else.

You can see that in the series: attitudes that you assimilate at home simply get perpetuated.
Children who have lived through situations of gender-based and sexist violence have that fear. That’s why it was interesting for the children of the lead couple to be males: that way, we could see how two men experienced it from a different place. In the character played by Miguel Bernardeau, there is that fear of repeating a pattern you are unable to control.

Also, in society, we don’t often talk about psychological abuse, which undermines other people.
Harassment is awful. With verbal abuse, you put down another person and make them feel bad. We are too tolerant of this because it belongs to the private lives of couples, but there’s also the possibility that there is someone there who is feeling completely alone.

How does this fear eventually build up?
Fear is the backbone of the entire series. It’s very powerful and invisible, but still tangible. With Querer’s mise-en-scène, its silences and its situations, I wanted the viewer to see that fear is present, even though we don’t see an extremely explicit form of violence on screen. There are situations where fear is there and you notice that the characters act out of fear: fear of disappointing a father, of the consequences of this, or of a husband reacting in a certain way. And how fear conditions all of those relationships. This can lead someone to be stuck in an abusive relationship for years on end.

It’s something terrible that happens in real life, when the abused person feels guilty about what’s happened.
That’s one of the most painful things. We did research with lawyers, psychologists and victims, who have to dispel that feeling of guilt because they didn’t do such and such a thing, when actually, the most likely thing is that they couldn’t have done anything, and nor do they shoulder the blame for what happened to them. Dispelling that sensation of guilt is difficult because it's a visceral feeling, although rationally, you can make a case for it perfectly well. But with psychological support, it ends up being cured.

(Translated from Spanish)