Set in a Madrid worn down by the pandemic, the story follows Blanca, a veteran nurse, and Eva, her intern, as they make home visits to care for people who no longer expect to be saved. While the young woman clings to a naive idea of what is right, the more experienced nurse moves comfortably in a territory where good and evil are no longer clearly defined, and each visit pushes the boundary between care and abuse a little further. This is the premise of Pretty Shitty World, the second film directed by Asturian Yayo Herrero, following The Maus [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
fiche film], released in 2017. Herrero previously directed the short film Safari (2014), which was nominated for the Goya Awards and selected for the Critics' Week at Cannes.

The cast includes Raquel Guerrero (recently seen in the series La vida breve and El casoplón), Pooky Jongen (who appeared in the mini-series La caja de arena), Karlos Aurrekoetxea (The Last Romantics [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
fiche film]), Vicente Gil, Lola Rodríguez, Arantxa Zambrano and Mapi Plácido.

“Often, you don’t know what drives you to make a film until it is finished. Looking back, I think there was a clear creative urgency," Herrero tells Cineuropa. “After the pandemic, my mother, who is a nurse, went through extreme situations that made me wonder how one can survive within a system that has failed. At the same time, after my first film, I decided to take things slowly, but several projects fell through and I felt stuck. That frustration made me want to start filming again immediately.”

“That urgency,” the filmmaker continues, "led me to shoot the film with private funding, without going through the usual channels. I decided to put money in from my own pocket and rely on the support of people close to me — people outside the film industry who believed in the project. It was a way of reclaiming a free and vocational relationship with the act of filmmaking. In that sense, Pretty Shitty World was born both out of anger at the feeling that the system is not working, and out of a love for cinema and the need to keep filming.

Regarding her narrative style, Herrero explains that "I prefer to work from a position of minimalism, where every shot has to matter. We live in a time saturated with images that have lost their value. That's why I try to reduce elements to a minimum and rely on the most basic thing: the face. Extreme close-ups are a fundamental expressive tool and a kind of battlefield, where the characters' decisions, doubts and ethical contradictions are concentrated. The film relies on the actors' expressions, accepting the risk of limiting narrative resources.”

“My intention is not to deliberately provoke, but neither is it to reassure. I’m interested in cinema that strikes a chord and forces the viewer to engage in the story. I wanted to explore that grey area where we no longer know when we have crossed a line — the process by which you begin to normalise things that, a year earlier, would have seemed unacceptable. There is something recognisable in that, and that is why it can be uncomfortable. If the film makes you uncomfortable, it’s because it doesn’t offer definitive answers or prefabricated emotions. I would like it to function as a lasting experience, and something that stays with the viewer long after they have seen it," she concludes.

Pretty Shitty World is a production by Bro Cinema.