09/06/2005

Three years after his first feature film Piedras, screened in the Berlin Festival 2002, Ramón Salazar is back on the Spanish screens with 20 Cm, a one of a kind tribute to musicals which was one of the big winners at the last Malaga Film Festival (Critics Awards, Best Make-up and Best Film).
Initially inspired by the musical Dancer In The Dark, Ramón Salazar wrote a script in which a character forces herself to dream in order to escape from unbearable reality. Only this time, the unbearable reality is quite different from Bjork's disease in Lars Von Trier's film. What bothers Adolfo are the 20cm he longs to remove from his body - in order to become a real woman. Mónica Cervera (who collaborates with the director for the third time after the short film Hongos and Piedras) plays Adolfo, or Marieta, a character who dreams of quitting the prostitution underworld and who suffers from narcolepsy. When she falls asleep, she dreams about being a woman and becoming a musical superstar.

Indifferent to those who think his cinema is a pale imitation of Almodovar's universe, Ramón Salazar has chosen a bunch of stars for supporting roles, among them Rossy di Palma, Pilar Bardem, Lola Dueñas Antonia San Juan and Nijwa Nimri. Certain scenes featuring these actresses were, however, cut from the final version due to (alleged) pressure from the producers, which the director from Malaga didn’t hold back in denouncing: "We wanted to make a musical with a very sombre view of the prostitution underworld. The producers wanted to make a clean comedy".
Produced by Aligator Producciones, Picasso Estudios and Jet Films, 20 Centimetres is distributed by Warner and appears in Spanish theatres from tomorrow.