We interviewed director Lucía Casañ Rodríguez, whose first full-length feature film A Bathroom of One’s Own [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Lucía Casañ Rodríguez
scheda film] has just opened Mostra de València after its world premiere at the Shanghai Film Festival.

Cineuropa: The film tells the story of a housewife who finds her refuge to escape her life and write in the bathroom. Why were you interested in telling this story?
Lucía Casañ Rodríguez: When I started writing it four years ago, I was already concerned about the relationship between space and the personal and professional development that a person can have as a result of those little corners that we often have to find in order to define our identity. I had seen the film El anacoreta, written by Rafael Azcona with Juan Estelrich and directed by the latter, and I also found myself reading Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, so everything came together and that's where this film came from. In the end, A Bathroom of One’s Own questions how we behave in public and private spaces, but through something as accessible and universal as the bathroom. And, on the other hand, I think the film is very topical today because we are facing a very obvious problem with the housing issue. Just like the protagonist, there is a whole part of society whose life projects are being cut short because they have no space in which to develop, or those cities that no longer have their public spaces with tourist apartments and are starting to lose their identity. I was interested in exploring this with the film and opening up a debate and reflection around these issues.

Virginia Woolf's famous quote from A Room of One's Own appears explicitly in the film...
Virginia Woolf acted not only as a reference for me, but also as a trigger. I was particularly struck by a passage in the book where Woolf reflects on whether the approval of universal suffrage or the inheritance she received after the death of her aunt in a horse accident was more important to her, and concludes that money was more important. So that made me think that, Virginia Woolf is the intellectual that we know because of a horse accident. And I was struck by the thought of how many Virginia Woolfs we have not known because there were no such accidents. The protagonist of the film manages to be herself thanks to having a room of her own, but also thanks to this money that she receives in the same way, and so there is a clear reference to this inheritance.

It has a very distinct aesthetic, somewhere between that of the 50s and 60s with touches of the present day. Why did you want to use this aesthetic? Was the form also a way of getting to the heart of it?
Through the aesthetics I wanted to escape from what is strictly realistic or costumbrist, because I wanted the audience to be part of the story that the protagonist is writing. I wanted the audience to be able to travel with her, to travel towards this possibility of imagining different futures and to experience with her the adventures she goes through in the bathrooms. Each character in the film is dressed in the period they feel they belong to, which is why the main character's wardrobe is also deconstructed as her thinking evolves.

I also see a certain tendency towards theatricality in the narrating and in the staging. Were you interested in using certain elements of theatre?
It’s something that has always interested me. The cinematographic references that I have are also a bit theatrical in their staging, with conversations that are not so realistic. Here, I was very interested precisely because of what I said, because I wanted to detach myself from reality and also to be able to propose this conversation between the individual and the space, so that the public could travel through it through their gaze.

The film also ends up being a kind of hymn to the transformative and liberating power of the imagination. Was this the aim?
That's totally what I wanted to say, because I also worry about the lack of imagination, of being able to imagine different worlds. I think that the space, the noise, the environmental conditions that we have today in society make imagining different futures very complex. That’s why the protagonist makes an effort to try to change and adapt the space and from there to be able to be, to imagine and to be able to define herself.