11/04/2022 - The film, which was screened at the Cinéfondation in Cannes and has been a candidate at major festivals, stars Bárbara Lennie alongside non-professional actors

It is summer in a small town in south-eastern Spain and a storm threatens to once again break the banks of the river that runs through it, the most polluted in Europe. Throughout the town, an old popular belief is repeated like a mantra, claiming that some women are predestined to disappear with each new flood, because they were born with "the water in them". And in these lands, the liquid element is always linked to death as young people try to survive the weariness of a summer here. In this electric atmosphere that precedes the storm, Ana - who dreams of fleeing this town that reeks of death - and José fall in love.

Selected for the Cinéfondation residence at the Cannes Film Festival, and for the Ikusmira Berriak at the San Sebastian Film Festival (where it won the Ikusmira Berriak - REC Grabaketa Estudioa award), as well as the support of Media Desk Suisse and Eurimages, El agua [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Elena López Riera
film profile] - whose synopsis we opened this article with - is one of the most eagerly awaited titles of this season not only in Spain, but also at major European film festivals. The film, shot last year, stars Bárbara Lennie (who we recently saw in the Netflix series El desorden que dejas, and this season will release Los renglones torcidos de Dios) and Nieve de Medina (The Mother [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Alberto Morais
film profile]) alongside non-professional actors.

El agua is the feature directorial debut of Elena López Riera (Orihuela, 1982), a visual artist with a PhD in Audiovisual Communication. She moved to Switzerland in 2008, where she teaches film and comparative literature at the University of Geneva. The filmmaker is also co-founder of lacasinegra, a group of artists dedicated to researching and experimenting with new audiovisual devices.

Her first short film, Pueblo, premiered in the Directors' Fortnight at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and was selected for more than 20 international festivals.  The following year, Las vísceras was screened at Locarno and received the Silver Mikeldi Award at Zinebi. Her latest work, Los que desean, was nominated for the European Film Awards and won the Pardino d'oro at Locarno 2018. The Cinémathèque Française (Paris), the Cineteca Colombiana (Bogotá) and the Gijón International Film Festival (Spain) have dedicated retrospectives to her work. She has also worked as a programmer for festivals such as Entrevues Belfort (France), the Seville European Film Festival (Spain) and Visions du réel (Switzerland).

El agua –whose script is written by the director together with Philippe Azoury and filmed on location in the province of Alicante– is produced by SUICAfilms (Spain), Alina Film (Switzerland) and Les Films du Worso (France), in co-production with Radio Télévision Suisse, with support from the European MEDIA programme, the Swiss Ministry of Culture and the Valencian Film Institute. It will be distributed by Filmin.

(Translated from Spanish by Vicky York)