Maria Perez Sanz’s debut fiction feature Karen premiered at Seville European Film Festival in 2020 and scooped 14 Goya nominations. An original take on the life and work of Danish author Karen Blixen, it saw Extremadura, the western region bordering Portugal, stand in for Blixen’s Kenya home, and had the two main characters — Blixen (Christina Rosenvinge) and her servant Farah (Alito Rogers) — speak Spanish.
“The landscape was that of my childhood, including a house that belongs to my family, the place where I felt adventurous when I was a child,” says Perez Sanz. “The idea of discovering something new through image and sound is what interests me most in cinema.”
She adds that, rather than make a traditional biopic, the concept was “to focus on the relationship between Blixen and Farah, and the idea of destiny, fate, that’s present in all the writer’s work”.
The project had started out as a mix of fiction and documentary. “I like the idea of filming documentary as if I were filming fiction, and fiction as documentary,” says Perez Sanz. She began in documentaries, exploring her passion for art and cinema first through shorts, then the 2015 doc feature Malpartida Fluxus Village, about German artist Wolf Vostell and the museum he set up in Malpartida, a village in Extremadura.
“I started working with friends with the means we had at hand, but bit by bit you get more ambitious,” explains Perez Sanz of Karen, which was shot “miraculously” in 10 days, in an “austere minimalist style”.
Perez Sanz is now working on the screenplay for her second fiction feature, at the Spanish Film Academy residency, mentored by Carlos Vermut. Set in contemporary Madrid, Leaving Madrid is altogether more personal, rather than based on the work of others. The main character is a film director who has been abandoned by her partner and is going through a bad professional patch. But things start to happen for her when she decides to leave Madrid, as if the city were trying to hold on to her.
Perez Sanz has also finished another short that will soon hit the festival circuit. La Niña Mártir is inspired by Cristina Morales’ book Last Afternoons With Teresa De Jesús (Últimas Tardes Con Teresa De Jesús) about the 16th-century Spanish mystic and writer Teresa of Avila.
Contact: Maria Perez Sanz
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