Ventura Durall returns to fiction with ‘L’Ofrena’, a film woven around a labyrinth of passions

10/27 / 2020.- Five years of preparation are what Ventura Durall, director of the film, has needed to put together the pieces of  L’Ofrena, a film whose action fluctuates between the past and the present. “We wanted to create a present, that of  the characters, which is much more claustrophobic with its closed shots and cold light, in contrast to the idealized past of  first love, the bright landscapes and the more open characters”, explained the director, who attended the screening in order  to present his film in the Spanish Cinema section of Seminci.

L’Ofrena deals with the story of Violeta, the character played by Anna Alarcón, who receives an unexpected visit in her psychiatric office. Her visitor is Rita, played by Verónica Echegui, the wife of Jan, Violeta’s old teenage love who marked her life after leaving her in a traumatic way  twenty years ago. Rita enlists Violeta’s help to try to regain the love of her husband Jan, played by Àlex Brendemühl. Following from that conversation between the two female protagonists, there begins a  search for forgiveness in what appears to be Jan’s first step in trying to rewrite the former couple’s  story.

The embryo of the film took shape  between 2014 and 2015, when “we developed the  first idea for  this love triangle, but it was not until the beginning of this year that we were eventually able to complete the film’s production and editing. The pandemic delayed the whole process”,  explained the director.

Durall was accompanied by Anna Alarcón  during the screening’s presentation at Seminci. “The main challenge when playing Violeta has been to hold in check the magma of feelings that the character  experiences. I tried to make  those emotions surface  little by little by regulating feeling in order  to show the characters  arc and the mourning that she goes through”, said the actress.