Barely three years ago, her first fiction feature film, Yo, Impossible, was selected by Venezuela to compete for the Oscar for the best international feature.

This week, Patricia Ortega will present her next film at the Sundance Film Festival, Mamacruz, a Spanish production. The movie will screen in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition. The long journey of how Ortega finally got to make the film is the story of many in her country.

Patricia Ortega was forced to immigrate and take her next project elsewhere.

Starring Kiti Manver, who in her youth participated in five Pedro Almodóvar films, including Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Mamacruz tells with humor and a lot of humanity how a very religious 70-year-old woman who lives in a small town in Andalusia discovers her sexuality when she is forced to go online to communicate with her daughter, who has moved to Vienna and stumbles across images she never imagined.

The following are excerpts from our Zoom interview with Ortega when she was in Spain. She is in Park City, Utah for the 2023 edition of the Sundance Film Festival.

How does it make you feel that this story you wrote in your house in Maracaibo, Venezuela reaches the public as a Spanish film and at the Sundance Film Festival?

It has been a long journey in which the work has paid off. I also feel that there have been some very lucky opportunities that got this film to where it did. I say this last thing because I was only able to meet and speak for 15 minutes with Olmo Figueredo (producer) in Rome. Then we never saw each other again.

Everything continued online until two years later, I arrived in Seville to start pre-production. From that fortuitous meeting to the premiere of the film at Sundance, a lot of things have happened that were like encouragement for me.

It happens that many times along the way, we lose strength because it is very difficult to obtain financing to carry out a film. The “no” is always ahead of you and you must know how to manage those rejections. Mamacruz began as a Venezuelan production, then it was going to be Colombian, then Argentine, and so it mutated until it ended up being Spanish.

Being able to launch on this platform makes me see that the important thing is to have the flexibility to look for the best opportunities without losing your goal as a creator. That is, not letting the story you want to make get out of hand. This was a great challenge and seeing the film there (in Sundance) today makes me feel super happy because everything that was done to make it possible was worth it.

 

The interesting thing about the film is that anyone who sees it without knowing who you are would never imagine that it was conceived in Venezuela because it seems like a story born in a small town in Andalusia. How difficult was it to adjust to this new context?

I was very scared because I did not know Seville. I had only gone to some festivals in Spain where I had been able to visit Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia but as three-day visits, as how it usually happens when these events take place.

So, the great challenge was to get to an unknown city but when I lived that Sevillian Holy Week which seemed like a street play in which people appropriated the saints, and dressed them however they wanted in a kind of pagan ritual full of colors and fervor, I understood what the link was because I realized that it was closely connected to what is happening in Venezuela with those religious rituals where we also appropriated them and turned them into something else.

Then I began to see the connection from there, seeing how the popularity is expressed in colors, rhythms, and textures. I realized that we are not so different, that this indiscretion of appropriating an official ritual and turning it into something totally different is a lot like my city where the saints have flowers and even the sorcerers have the Virgin Mary next to Cacique Guaicaipuro.

All that syncretism made me see the connection immediately. From there, I began to get into that world. It wasn’t very difficult. I think the key was finding the similarities or those commonalities.

 

How did the idea for this film come about?

I took care of my mother for a long time while she was sick and she was undergoing chemotherapy. One day, while I was rearranging the room where she slept, I found an image that was surprising to me because she is super conventional. I am like the “black sheep” of the family, the one who always goes on the weird side.

So I said to myself, the mother that I know would not take this photo. It means that there are things about her as a woman that I don’t know. From there, I was very inspired. I thought about my grandmother who spent her whole life cooking, who had nine children and who was always looking out for them and my own mother who also really sacrificed herself and gave her life for us.

That’s where the question arose: where are the women behind those roles bringing service to the family? And based on that, I started writing. Then, reviewing the Japanese erotic art called shunga, I found a wonderful image of a huge vagina that emitted rays of light and there were some little men trying to fight with it.

That’s where the idea of that light emanating from the body as a symbol of freedom came. From the photo of my mother and the image of the shunga, I started the story. They were two symbols that I had like a lighthouse.

 

Although today there are many women who are connected to their sexuality in a full and healthy way, I think that if you go to any town in Seville, you will find many who are the same as the protagonist of Mamacruz.

I think that this not only happens with women but also with men, regardless of their age or where they are from. Although there are countries that are obviously more open than others, I feel that sexuality is still not normalized, that talking about sex, fantasies and desire is something forbidden.

It seems that saying, “Yesterday, I masturbated watching something and I liked it,” is not the same as talking about what you are going to have for lunch or dinner. However, it is exactly the same.

So regardless of age, place and gender, I believe that we still do not naturalize this healthy relationship between the body and sexuality. In the case of the film, I start from a personal view because I was raised in a house inhabited by women but I feel that it goes further, that our society has a long way to go to normalize the issue.

 

Anyone who doesn’t know it would never suspect that in your protagonist is a Pedro Almodóvar girl. Why did you decide to cast Kiti Mánver, who ultimately turned out to be key to making your film work?

I remember that when I was talking to Olmo, I didn’t have an image in my head of who could be the protagonist. What I did tell him was that I needed a woman who could be rejuvenated without makeup, who had a very flexible emotional spectrum and the ability to start out looking very old only with her gestures and the movements of her body and then, as everything happens to her, she becomes younger.

We wanted someone who could look simple and spontaneous like any grandmother, and at the same time come off as sexy. Olmo, who knows Kiti not only as an actress because he has worked with her but also as a person since they are friends, immediately told me that she was the ideal person for the role. She had an awareness of acting work that went beyond being an actress.

Since she worked in theater as a producer, she had training in front of and behind the cameras that made her have a deeper awareness regarding the construction of the character. When I talked to her, I fell in love. I didn’t want to see any of her performances because nothing seemed like what I needed. I was going to see her as the “Almodóvar girl” and I wanted something else.

So, I started watching interviews about her life. I loved her opinions and her vision. From there, we talked and it was love at first sight. I realized that she is wonderful because she can be an “Almodóvar girl” and also be something else. When I look at Mamacruz, I really appreciate her work because she gave herself completely. I don’t see her being afraid of being emotionally and physically vulnerable. I feel that Kiti is the soul of the film.

 

What was it like turning her into this woman we see at the beginning?

The first thing we did with Kiti was to begin to understand that character, why she did what she did, where she came from, what happened to her when she was alone, what she thought and what she dreamed of. We began to create a Cruz that was real, that although these things were not seen in the film, for us they were necessary to keep them very much in mind.

Then there is a small gesture that Cruz makes throughout the film, that I don’t know if anyone will notice, that is not in the script but it was created by Kiti. We were finding things from working with improvisations where the essence of each scene was. I did not want there to be memorization of dialogues, or movements, or actions.

So Kiti was finding the character physically and emotionally and I was also able to contribute other things to enrich the shots. The same happened with the rest of the women. So that was really the job, not to be 100 percent faithful to what was written but to use that to find everything naturally and spontaneously because I didn’t want to make a caricature of a grandmother or a woman.

 

Is there a way back for you, or are you going to stay working in Spain?

No, there is no going back because in Venezuela, even if I dedicate myself to something else that has nothing to do with cinema, I don’t have a job. I tried for a long time to stay because of my mother. It was very difficult for me to separate from her but I had to do it for financial reasons.

It really was like a forced exile since my mother needed some attention and, in my country, there is no social security or guarantees of anything. You have to have money and everything is dollarized so I had to produce those dollars.

So it was that I traveled to Argentina where I did not do well at work. I supported myself but it is in Spain where the door is opening for me to work in what I like. Likewise, I don’t mind working at whatever it is. I am used to surviving as a migrant and I do what I have to do to provide for my mother.

Opportunities have appeared here that never happened to me in Venezuela. I could have continued making films there but in a very precarious way, very limited and with a lot of sacrifice. That does not mean that it is not difficult here to obtain financing for a project but I think there are some conditions that are much more harmonious.

It is true that in Spain, there are also problems and everything can be improved – that’s a fact. But at least, there are funds, alliances, tax incentives and a platform that allows films or series to be made. Then there is no going back because if I can continue working on what I like, I will not put it at risk and I will bet on it.

That does not mean that one does not want to make films in Venezuela. I am talking about daily life, work and livelihood. And it’s not that I don’t want to live in my country since migration has been one of the most complex and hardest processes that I have suffered in my life. But there comes a time when you have to make decisions for the well-being of your family.

 

Do you think there is a future for Venezuelan cinema?

I think so because the number of people who have migrated and those who are inside work together, have alliances and are networking. Maybe not right now but I’m sure that more co-productions will be consolidated soon. I know that this crisis that we are experiencing is helping to consolidate different production strategies.

Perhaps the upcoming projects will not have Venezuelan nationality but they will surely be shot there with talent from my land. The positive thing is that somehow, we manage to move the cinema forward without this populist thing of depending everything on the government and that is healthy.

It has really been painful and it is hard that we do not have a fund, that we cannot participate in the Ibermedia Program because we have a huge debt but that has faced us with the great challenge of having to continue working.

 

I know that you are working on your fourth film which would be your third fictional one. Is the topic going to be sexuality as well?

I cannot tell the story. It is a film whose theme is not about sexuality but there is a questioning of gender as a social construction. It is a film that somewhat deconstructs the binary vision of men or women. After making Yo, Imposible, which was such a painful film, I realized, and perhaps because I come from a lot of pain, that I am tired of those years of martyrdom with that Venezuelan daily life that was super hard.

That was, stick and stick every day and then the same thing happened to me as a migrant in Argentina. So I felt it was good to also address controversial and difficult issues but with points of view that give us positive alternatives. I think that is very important since there is always another possibility no matter how badly you are doing.

It seems that what I call “misery porn” sells more – than seeing us as sad, dark beings, involved in dramas and deaths – that it is the most profitable but I am tired of being a victim and that characters like Mama Cruz or the one in my next film are seen as victims. I like to have another point of view, that there is another vision.

 

Translated by Mario Amaya