Elena Manrique, director of Fin de fiesta: ‘I’m fed up with this narrative that says immigrants are coming to take our jobs’.

• The film, which competes in the Official Section, asks the spectator what they would do if an immigrant took refuge in their home

Valladolid, 22 October 2024. The director Elena Manrique, known for her work as executive producer on films such as Cell 211 and Pan’s Labyrinth, has presented her debut feature film, Fin de fiesta, in the Official Section of the 69th edition of the Valladolid International Film Festival (SEMINCI), accompanied by the actors Sonia Barba, Edith Martínez and Beatriz Arjona, and the producers Belén Atienza and Carlos Rosado (La Claqueta PC).

In a work that speaks of class privilege, the director briefly described the relationship between the characters in the film: ‘I’m very interested in talking in the film about the solidarity of the lower classes, because I’m fed up with this narrative that says that immigrants come to take our jobs. Because they show solidarity, and I refuse to think otherwise’.

Fin de fiesta tells the story of Carmina, a woman whose daily life is disrupted when she discovers that an undocumented immigrant has hidden in her house, fleeing from the police. Carmina decides to hide the young man, but this act of apparent generosity becomes tinged with darker intentions.

On the origin of the idea, the director pointed out: ‘A few years ago, an African boy who arrived on a boat on a beach in Cádiz took refuge in the garden of some friends of mine. What they did was to take the boy to a bus station, they gave him money and he went on his way. That story had always stuck in my mind’. In this sense, she acknowledged the complexity of building the character of Carmina and thanked the producers for their initial trust: ‘It was important to understand the film I wanted to make, because it moves on that fine line between political correctness and incorrectness, and if we don’t believe the character of Carmina, there is no film’.

The actress Sonia Barba, who plays the main character Carmina, has agreed on the difficult process of working on her character, until she realised that a role like hers is not so difficult to play because she says whatever she wants at all times, without thinking about whether she is hurting anyone: ‘So it was very easy to arrive on set and be Carmina’. On this issue she also added: ‘Carmina’s loneliness is the biggest trait I noticed; the madness in which she lives because she is incapable of seeing the other, she only has the capacity to use those around her, but she is incapable of looking her maid in the eye and seeing who is there’.

Producer Belén Atienza, also responsible for several of Juan Antonio Bayona’s films such as The Impossible (2012) and The Snow Society (2023), said that the first thing that attracted them to the script, written by Elena Manrique, `is that her vision is very unique, very special and manages to revisit an important social issue, but she does it from a place that I had never seen before. It has a lot to do with how she is and how she looks at the world.´

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