03/12/2025 - After directing thrillers like Mindscape, the Spaniard is tackling his most personal project to date, inspired by his mother’s diary, and starring Marina Guerola, Ana Wagener and Quim Àvila

Director Jorge Dorado with actress Marina Guerola during the shoot for The Possible Lives of My Mother (© Quim Vives/Fasten Films)

Shooting is currently under way for The Possible Lives of My Mother, a film directed by Jorge Dorado (a habitual director of thrillers such as Lost & Found [+see also:
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interview: Jorge Dorado
film profile] as well as series in the same genre, such as The Head [+see also:
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The cast is made up of Marina Guerola (nominated for a Goya Award for Glimmers [+see also:
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interview: Jorge and Alberto Sánchez-C…
series profile], appearing in this year’s Another Man [+see also:
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In the story, written by Dorado, Natxo López and Teresa de Pelegrí, we see a woman driving the wrong way down a road. Her name is Luisa, she is 80 years old and her memory is starting to get blurry. After becoming disorientated, she crashes. Her youngest son, Jorge, is a director going through a rough patch, and is accustomed to shooting series and commissioned films. Eva, her eldest daughter, harbours an old grudge: that her mother didn’t always make room for her. They have both been distant from Luisa for some time, and there is also a distance between the two siblings that seems irreconcilable. However, the accident forces them to come together again.

In the director’s own words, “The Possible Lives of My Mother is the rediscovery of a woman and, through her, the rediscovery of a whole century’s worth of emotions, silence and memories. In 2011, my mother took the wrong lane when taking a detour on a dual carriageway, and she drove the wrong way for several miles. I got scared, so I took her to various doctors, and they all agreed on the diagnosis: Alzheimer’s, an illness that she had gone to great lengths to hide from me and my siblings. As she couldn’t live alone any more, we had to clear out her house. Among the documents that ended up in my possession were photo albums and a floppy disk with a handwritten label that said: ‘Biography’.

“At that moment,” continues Jorge Dorado, “I found out that she had led an intense life, full of crossroads, brave decisions and contradictions. At the age of 22, she became a single mother in Paris after fleeing her parents’ house while pregnant, as she led a stifling existence there. During the 1960s and 1970s, she lived through impossible love affairs, political struggles, social changes and a constant yearning for freedom. In Paris and Madrid, she met artists, actors, soldiers and intellectuals who strove to change the world… I never imagined that she could have borne witness to the history of Spain by – sometimes unintentionally – forming part of some of the most important events of that era,” he sums up.

The Possible Lives of My Mother is a production by Adrià Monés for Fasten Films and Borja Pena for Vaca Films, together with Alexandra Hoesdorff and Desirée Nosbusch for Deal Productions (Luxembourg). It boasts funding from the ICAA, ICEC, Creative Europe – MEDIA and Film Fund Luxembourg, as well as the involvement of RTVE, Movistar Plus+ and Netflix. 

(Translated from Spanish)