Laura Ferrés explores “the mystery of the everyday” in La imatge permanent, her debut feature, which arrives today at the Official Selection after its screening at Locarno. If, in Los desheredados, Goya for best fiction short film and winner of the Cannes Critics’ Festival, she narrated, halfway between documentary and fiction, the closure of her father’s bus company, it is her maternal family that inspires her first feature film, in which she explores the roots of those who emigrated from Andalusia to Catalonia, as was her case.
“The film tries to be a portrait of these people, but it becomes a fiction that serves me to talk about things that I consider important,” Ferrés said during a speech to the media in which he pointed out that this substratum of reality is at the service of “an imaginary of its own”.
“The themes interest me, but, above all, I am interested in cinema”, explained the Catalan filmmaker, who proposes in this film a language “that oscillates between naturalism and artifice” and that finds parallels with the style of Robert Bresson, an approach that takes shape with the inclusion of non-professional actors -actresses, in this case-, such as María Luengo and Rosario Ortega, its protagonists. “For me, this has been surreal; I’m on cloud nine,” confessed Luengo, an impression shared by Ortega. “Who was going to tell me that this would happen to me,” added the co-star of a film about Carmen, a publicist who, in the midst of looking for ‘real’ faces for a campaign, meets Antonia, a woman who carries a wound from the past.
