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”.
