The director Andrea Jaurrieta presented her second feature film, Nina, with which she competes in the official competition section, a western that reflects on sexual abuse through pain, the process of reparation, and revenge.

Patricia López Arnáiz stars in the film — based on the play by José Ramón Fernández and with references to Chekhov’s The Seagull — alongside actor Darío Grandinetti. Arnáiz plays Nina, a woman who returns to the seaside town where she grew up with a shotgun in her handbag to take revenge on a famous writer to whom the town pays tribute. 

Jaurrieta explained the process of creating his characters in a press conference: If we look at good guys and bad guys, it’s very easy to build a very obvious monster'. And she didn’t want to build stereotypically evil characters 'because in real life, evil never comes across as evil', she said. The director was interested in conveying how these monsters 'can be anyone in your environment, even your uncle or your cousin', and go perfectly unnoticed by society. 

The script reflects a constant torment marked by the traumas of the main character’s past. This torment is also evident in the heavy atmosphere of the scenes and in elements, such as the landscape and the colour red, present throughout the film.

Jaurrieta explained that she wrote the script in two colours — the present in black pen and the past in blue — because she wanted the difference between the two times to be very marked throughout the filming and editing. To this end, she didn’t resort to flashbacks, instead opting for a spiral script — as Jaurrieta defined it — with intertwined moments in which the editing work was key to the spectator not losing the thread. 

López Arnáiz noted that the role was painful work for her, because in every scene she was in contact with the wound her character is carrying with her, almost without rest. She also focused on conveying truthfulness in her performance rather than the violent aestheticism of westerns. Her character drinks from the pain to empower herself and pour out her rage and pent-up anger. The actress confessed that immersing herself in the reality of sexual violence against minors has been complex and delicate. 'It’s so difficult to learn about the experiences of girls so young they end up in a spiral from which they don’t know how to escape', she said. 

Actor Darío Grandinetti, for his part, was interested in the concept of his character because he doesn’t present himself as an obviously evil man, rather the opposite. His work consisted of making people believe he was a cultured, seductive, kind man, without revealing his true self. 

For Grandinetti, the film feels necessary. 'I wish there were more films and plays like this one because art doesn’t change reality, but it helps us to show it in a way that can help us to become aware, to see things from a different perspective so that we don’t naturalise or normalise them', he said. Finally, he stated that 'chronicling reality is also healing for the actors, not just for the spectator'.

On the main theme of the film — sexual violence — something still so present today, Jaurrieta said that 'we have to speak out with the truth so that it stops happening, because if we continue to remain silent, we’ll be legitimising this type of unacceptable behaviour, and we’ll never get out of these structures´. 

The rest of the cast is completed by Aina Picarolo, Iñigo Aranburu, Mar Sodupe, Ramón Agirre, Silvia de Pé, Daniel Vitallé and Eneko Gutiérrez Lavandero. The film is scheduled to premiere on 10 May.