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Grace Querejeta . Madrid, 1962. Film director. He released his latest film, Invisibles , just before the pandemic closed theaters. He explains that he is now "directly unemployed", but he is still optimistic about the future of cinema.

Do you de-escalate like crazy or fear? Calmly. Confinement I am handling relatively well. I'm quite methodical on the subject of work and schedules, so I established a routine that includes sports, reading and table work. It seems to me that when all this is over, it will be an enormous happiness, but from the point of view of the most basic behavior I am going to have a certain Stockholm syndrome, it is going to be difficult for me to face normal life outside the home again. The much-worn comfort zone has been reduced to the size of a floor. Yes, it is a little misleading security bubble, because we have seen that we were not really safe anywhere, but it creates a feeling of womb. And now you have to take the leg out and see what happens. It gives a little vertigo. At least to me. You released 'Invisibles', your last film, on Friday, March 6 and the cinemas closed in Spain the following week. There can be no worse timing ... That's right. It was a shame, because in the few days we were able to be on the bill we did a lot of box office and we had great expectations. We are confident that the film will have a second life when the cinemas reopen, if it is really profitable for them to open to a third of their capacity, which I do not know, and if people want to return to the cinema, I do not know either. . It will be like a re-release in very strange conditions. Does the cinema have a future as we knew it? It is possible that people are afraid to go to the cinema at first, but in reality the rooms are going to be the most controlled places because, disinfecting every two by three, it is easy to keep your distance. It is more risky to go to the supermarket and we have gone even in the worst moments. In the cinema there is no movement, you can be with your mask and leave empty seats. The problem will be that fear is free and it is difficult to overcome it. In case the platform boom was not enough, these weeks several premieres planned for the theater have been made online and have worked. No, because the confinement has only reaffirmed what we already knew: that more and more cinema is seen at home and on the small screen. People will end up going back to theaters, but always living with home cinema on demand. It has been like this for a long time and, logically, it will go further. It is the future and it is absurd to face it. I do not feel that it is unfair competition. My father (the producer Elías Querejeta) already warned me in 1999. He asked me about the possibility of releasingWhen you return to my side directly on Canal +. To me, that seemed like a crazy thing, a sacrilege, and he said to me: "Okay, okay, well, in cinema, but this is the future and you don't know about it." It was 20 years ago ... and look, has confinement socially reinforced the entertainment culture? Without a doubt. This confinement without culture would have been a prison, terrifying. Hopefully from all this horror you get the feeling that culture not only instructs, but accompanies us, entertains us, teaches us, makes us imagine and fly outside the confines of a very difficult situation. I hope that this disaster has served to really appreciate the role of culture in our lives. And also that it is treated as the important industry that it is, because many of us have been left without jobs. I had to be shooting a series and, instead, I am directly unemployed. Didn't it happen to you that you thought you were going to see a thousand pending movies and have ended up watching the ones you already knew by heart? Yes, I was watching Missing with my son. Doom the other day. I have combined current television series with old movies that I wanted to revisit with him, who also works in movies, and there are a certain type of movies that he has not seen. And I have already taken advantage of it. 'Invisibles' is about, worth the redundancy, the invisibility of women in society from the age of 50. It is a classic vindication of the actresses, who point out that when you stop being young the roles disappear.It is a common complaint among the actresses and, if they all coincide, for some reason, what happens is that I have always offered roles to women of all ages and I don't have that feeling. But it is one thing that happens to almost all women from a certain age. The fact that the film started so well at the box office tells us that those stories exist and interest. I think it's a movie, without wanting to throw flowers at me, that if things had gone normal it could have marked a turning point: not everything has to be shots and explosions, not everything has to be science fiction, not everything has to be men in the screen. There may be box office movies starring normal women of any age. Stories about people, neither especially pretty nor especially young, living real lives. At least my three actresses are in their fifties but beautiful, that I have earned. You say that you have always offered that type of role, but you are also an exception, because the years go by and the number of Spanish directors is still low. There are very few. Even if a Spanish Kathryn Bigelow came out to direct films about attacks and those types of subjects that say they are very masculine, although they are not, she would still be an exception. There is a certain effervescence in the Catalan school with young directors making a lot of cinema with women, but it is a minority. I want to think that this will change, but ... You have spent your entire life in the world of cinema, has there been a real change as a result of #MeToo or has there been more noise than nuts? It is real, not radical or sufficient, but real. I can assure you that the behavior that was in the filming with women before is not what it is today, although there are still stupid people without an ethical code who do not know how to behave with a woman. But I come from a cinema, the one from 30 years ago, in which women were treated very very very badly. Not so much to the actresses, who have always had more power and were more untouchable, than to girls who occupied a lower position in the hierarchy. It was tremendous. It was normal that on a shoot any man would touch the ass of a young partner and everyone would laugh. Macho and pimp. And she couldn't claim anything in that environment. Today it is unthinkable that things like this happen. Cinema has changed as society has changed: quite a bit, but it is still missing. Have you felt invisible? Yes, totally. If not, I couldn't have made this movie. At 25 years old it wouldn't have occurred to me. Mercedes Sampietro told me 20 years ago: "There comes a time when you become invisible." I thought he was flogging himself. Such a beautiful woman, so smart, so wonderful ... And it turns out she was right. I have felt invisible as a woman and as a professional. I've had long seasons where I thought I'd never direct a movie again. It is the feeling of not counting at all, of having disappeared from the world at all levels.

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