Aina Clotet, Catalan actress and director, was recognized this Wednesday with the revelation award of the Critics’ Week — one of the events held alongside the Cannes festival dedicated to discovering new voices in cinema — for Viva, her first film as a director, following the success of her television series Esto no es Suecia. “Thank you for believing in our film and for opening the doors to the world,” she declared after going on stage with the announcement of the recognition delivered in association with the Louis Roederer Foundation by a jury chaired by Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia, the director of The Light We Imagine.
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The feature film, directed and performed by Aina Clotet, tells the story of a woman who has overcome breast cancer and feels a deep desire to live. Regarding this, the jury stated that the protagonist is a “radical” and “difficult” character who is equally lovable. They also highlighted the “visceral” and “extremely funny” performance of the awarded Clotet. The director and actress thanked the team that worked with her and the co-writer of the script, Valentina Viso, and her brother, also actor Marc Clotet. “To make a film it is very important to have a good team and I have had the best I could dream of,” she said in her speech, in which she dedicated the recognition to her children and family, starting with her partner, Marcel Borràs.
The award for best film went to the French La Gradiva, by filmmaker Marina Attal, one of the most talked-about feature films in Cannes. It tells the journey of a group of French high school students who take a school trip to Naples to discover the ruins of Pompeii and the bodies petrified by Vesuvius. There, a sudden vertigo invades them. One after another, they let themselves be dominated by desire and anger until they completely surrender.
In an interview with EL PAÍS after the premiere of Viva in Cannes, Clotet said: “The film is born from the desire to explore emotions. And I threw myself into two of them: one is fear, specifically of loneliness and death, and the other is the relationship of those terrors with dependencies in romantic love.” For the development of the main character for which she was awarded, she detailed that she did not focus on the illness, but on the mark left by cancer, “both emotional and physical, because instead of the right breast there is now a scar.” “That fear drives her to a carpe diem, to that desire to literally devour the world and everything in front of her,” she explained in the conversation. On the occasion, she also spoke about her influences: the French Mia Hansen-Løve, the Swedish Lukas Moodysson (“Besides his iconic films, he has a fantastic series, Gösta”) and the American Miranda July. “Actually, she influenced me at the end of the creative process. I find her an artist with a mix of tones that interests me a lot, in the style of Joachim Trier or Sean Baker. From Baker, I really like his ability to tell deep things from a place where humor appears and in extreme situations that are always believable at the same time.”
About the performance for which she was awarded this Wednesday, Clotet told this newspaper that she was not going to be the protagonist: “Things that happen. The first day, when I discovered that I was going to need two hours to put on the prosthesis and makeup before starting to shoot, I started to reschedule the filming. Luckily, with the days the process became faster, although the days remained marathon sessions. It was very important that it came out well: we wanted to show this different body and talk about Nora’s reappropriation of her own body from a beautiful place.” The film will arrive in Spanish cinemas on June 19.
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