Lucía Alemany: «The Innocence tries to show that the patriarchal figure is fading away»

20/10 / 2019.- Lucía Alemany, who made her directorial debut with the award-winning short  ’14 anys i un dia ‘, today presented in the Valladolid Festival’s section Spanish Cinema her first  feature film “The Innocence”, a teenage drama starring Carmen Arrufat whose cast also includes Laia Marull, Sergi López and Joel Bosque.

Alicia is a teenager who wants to be a circus artist but she has a very authoritarian father and a mother who is extremely concerned with the opinion of others.  While struggling to build a future for herself,  she spends the summer with her friends and with her boyfriend, who is several years older than her. As the small town’s local festival is nearing its end, she finds out that she is pregnant. The story, says  Lucía Alemany, “is based on personal experiences that I have known; that’s why we shot in my hometown”

“The film tries to show  that the patriarchal authority  is already beginning to fade away while it becomes an object of mockery,” says Alemany. But there was a time when these attitudes, reflected in the father and the protagonist’s  boyfriend, “made me live with fear”, confessed the director. The film’s cast spent  several weeks rehearsing, reviewing the script and adapting it to their own experiences. “Although we knew it was an improvisation, we kept working on the script at all times,” says Lucia Alemany. The final outcome turned out  as expected, even though, as pointed out by the film’s producers  Belén Sánchez and Lina Badenes “this improvisation game at first scared us, but it was a risk that was worth taking”.