Icíar Bollaín invites us to a wedding in La boda de Rosa
- The Madrilenian filmmaker is shooting her new film in Valencia; it stars Candela Peña and boasts a script written by Bollaín and Alicia Luna, who worked together on Take My Eyes
During the months of August and September, Icíar Bollaín has been filming her new feature, entitled La boda de Rosa [+see also:
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film profile] (lit. “Rosa’s Wedding”), in different locations in and around Valencia. The title character is played by Candela Peña, who is placing herself in the capable hands of the Madrilenian director once again after doing so in her feature debut, Hola, ¿estás sola?, back in 1995, and in Take My Eyes [+see also:
trailer
film profile]. Also returning is her co-writer, Alicia Luna; together they penned the storyline of Take My Eyes, a drama revolving around abuse that won seven Goya Awards in 2003 (including Best Screenplay), was seen by one million viewers and grossed €5 million.
According to the synopsis, the film’s main character is Rosa, who is about to turn 45 and realises that she’s always lived her life to serve everyone else. So she decides to up sticks, leave it all behind and press the nuke button: she wants to take charge of her life and fulfil her dream of starting her own business. But she will discover that her father, siblings and daughter have other plans, and that starting a new life is not so straightforward if it’s not written down in the family guidelines. “We have a joke in Spain: ‘How’s it going with your family?’ ‘Fine... I never see them’, and that’s perfectly embodied by Rosa, for whom reconciling what she yearns for with what other people want becomes this gargantuan task, even if it means organising her own wedding,” states Bollaín, who assures us, “There are many Rosas in our midst, and we’re all a bit like her… Learning to know what one wants and refusing to give up on it is a tough test to overcome, and sometimes we never achieve it our entire lives. But Rosa is determined to pull it off.”
Cineuropa talked to Alicia Luna about this professional reunion after more than 15 years: “Icíar and I are good friends, but during this time, she’s shot stories by Paul Laverty, such as The Olive Tree [+see also:
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film profile], although we have done adverts together,” the co-writer says. “La boda de Rosa is connected to our life-changing decisions: because you hit an age at which you realise there are a lot of dreams that you haven’t been able to make come true, because you’ve been exposed to what other people decide you will do.”
La boda de Rosa – the cast of which is rounded off by Sergi López, Nathalie Poza, Paula Usero and Ramón Barea – is a Tandem Films, Turanga Films and Setembro Cine production. It has secured the involvement of RTVE, Movistar Plus+ and À Punt Mèdia, and has been supported by the Valencian Cultural Institute. It will be distributed by Filmax in 2020.
(Translated from Spanish)
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