When she was a child, Andrea Jaurrieta’s father rented Honey, I Shrunk The Kids for her, and Carlos Saura’s Spanish Civil War drama ¡Ay Carmela! for the adults. But it was the latter that prompted Jaurrieta to fall in love with cinema, and she trained first as an actress before completing a degree in film studies and moving definitively behind the camera.
“I loved making things happen, using the lamps I had at home to light my first shorts,” she recalls.
Following her debut film Ana By Day, which screened at Malaga Film Festival in 2018 and was nominated for a Goya Award, Jaurrieta is currently in post on her second feature Nina. Patricia Lopez Arnaiz and Dario Grandinetti star in the film about a woman in her forties who returns to the coastal village where she grew up, with revenge on her mind. The film is produced by BTeam Pictures with Iconica, Irusoin and Jaurrieta’s own outfit Lasai.
“Nina revolves around the topic of consent,” says Jaurrieta of the project, which she has developed at the Spanish Film Academy’s residency programme and TorinoFilmLab.
The filmmaker describes her style as a contemporary take on the classics. “My references range from classic westerns like Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar to the cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson.”
She mentions Alice Rohrwacher, Pietro Marcello, Julia Ducournau and Lynne Ramsay as filmmakers whose work she follows and admires, as well as Pedro Almodovar and Isabel Coixet. And then there is Luis Buñuel, whose Belle De Jour was an influence on Ana By Day.
Jaurrieta is part of a new wave of women directors who are transforming the film landscape in Spain. “There are a lot of film labs and workshops that help in the diversity of voices in cinema as well as gender parity policies in Spain that have helped. There are also producers that are happy to take risks.
“Shooting is what makes me happy,” she continues. “I feel that I have made a leap forward with Nina and I can’t wait to make bigger and bigger projects.”
Contact: Gemma Garcia, Mesala Films
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