Marta Lallana, director of ‘Muyeres’: “They are women who have had very hard lives and are full of light”

Like a ripe fruit that falls by its own weight, and from a suggestion by Raül Refree, Muyeres, by Marta Lallana, began to take shape years before it was, in reality, a project. At the same time that the musician and producer was making the soundtrack for Ojos negros (a feature film that Lallana co-directed with Ivet Castelo), she began a collaboration with the Asturian musician Rodrigo Cuevas for Manual de cortejo, a full-fledged investigation into Asturian culture disguised as an album.

“Well, I think there could be a film here; you would love the subject,” Refree told Lallana. The end of the story is the film that the director has presented at the 68th Valladolid International Film Festival, focused on them, on Asturian women, and that competes in Meeting Point from her non-fiction narrative.

Along the way, new research, this time by the filmmaker herself, who began by watching a multitude of videos recorded about women for a program of RTPA (Radiotelevisión del Principado de Asturias) and, with the help of the ethnographer in charge of the program, managed to contact, door to door, some of the women protagonists.

“Some had already died, others were very old or in other homes…. I told myself that I should have gone ten years earlier,” explained Marta Lallana. That feeling of sadness of her first trip, the first of many for a year, is the main reason why the film is in black and white. But it was not all sorrow. From the naturalness and humility of her women, “who thought they had nothing special enough to be the protagonists of a film,” the filmmaker learned patience and the value of overcoming without stridency. “They are women who have had very hard lives, and yet they are full of light”.