Produced, written and directed by Sergi Rubió

Synopsis: After thirty years of being a daughter, wife and mother, Dolors decides to see what happens when she tries thinking of herself for the first time… and of course all changes force us to learn new lessons. Dolors has to learn how to follow her own path to its end, and be strong enough not to look back – to home, and a husband she still loves and respects, but who has still to learn to listen to his wife and find out what her needs are.

Cast: Montse Caminal (Dolors), Xavier Serrat (Ernest) and Jordi Domènech (Jordi)

Produced, written and directed by Sergi Rubió
Assistant Director: Ricard L. Befan
Sound: Carlos Fernández Lantero
Director of Photography: Cristóbal Franco
Assistant Camera: Clàudia Pons
Still Photographer: Jordi Martí
Original Music by Miquel Tejada
Edited by Xavier Vila

Awards and Festivals

30th National film festival “Premi Ciutat de Terrassa”. Spain, 2007.
Best Actress Award: Montse Caminal.

Col·lectiu de Dones en l'Església. Cicle: Pensem i parlem lliurement dins l'Església. Casal Pere IV, Sabadell (Barcelona) Spain, 2007.

Premiere in El Corte Inglés from Sabadell (Barcelona), Spain, 2007.

Click here for biography and filmography of Sergi Rubió

In this film what I have tried to show is that every change in our lives involves a period of learning.

THE MAKING OF THE FILM

Due to the actors’ different schedules, on the day of our first meeting and script reading I arranged to meet Xavier Serrat (Ernest) in the morning and Montse Caminal (Dolors) and Jordi Domènech (Jordi) in the afternoon.

I remember that the first thing Xavier asked me was why I had chosen him. I told him that I had imagined his voice while writing the script, and had never thought of any other actor. And even before I started writing the script, I had decided that during the telephone conversation we would never see Ernest’s face. So, in our first telephone conversation, I told Xavier that we would only hear his voice.*

I asked the three actors to raise all their doubts about their characters. Xavier explained to me that Dolors, in her thirty years with Ernest, had always been alone because he had never been able to see what she needed.

In the meeting with the actors who played Ernest’s wife and son, the questions concerned the news Jordi gives his mother about his girlfriend Neus’s promotion. Montse Caminal wasn’t sure whether Dolors envied her daughter-in-law. I said that Dolors projected onto Neus the usual desire parents have for our children: that they surpass us; only that in this case Dolors is a wife and mother who for thirty years has done nothing but care for her home and family.

I remember that, in filming the scenes with Dolors and her son, I made only one suggestion to the actors: that they made the pauses work. In the telephone conversation scene the two actors were really speaking over the phone, with Ernest almost beside himself upon hearing from his wife after her two-day absence, and Dolors trying not to weaken before the suffering of the husband she still loves and respects.

In editing the film, and seeing to the extent to which the actors had got to know their characters, I realised how fortunate I was to be working with such great professionals. This made me understand that a director’s work does not end with the editing. I understood this while editing the conversation between Dolors and her son Jordi. At all times I needed to consider how the two actors were looking at each other, and what their looks said about their sensitivity towards each other’s feelings, their awareness of what each other was thinking, and their memories of how they have both experienced these thirty years of matrimony. And, through the pauses, the tone of voice and Jordi’s looks we have understood the depths of suffering he has witnessed in his father since he called him to say that his mother had been gone from home for two days.

* When I was 18 I was struck by this narrative device when I saw it in the first five minutes of Coppola’s The rain people. Though I have never seen the film again I have wanted to pay homage to this scene for almost 11 years.