If the movie As beasts stands with the Goya at the award for the best film of the year this Saturday, a girl from Girona will accompany the director Rodrigo Sorogoyen to collect the pigheaded. Will be the celranenca Sandra Tapia, producer of the tapewhich heads the list of nominations for this edition of the Spanish film awards, with seventeen nominations, and which arrives at the Seville gala with the endorsement of having won the Forqué and Feroz awards.
He thriller de Sorogoyen, based on the true crime of a Dutch citizen in a Galician village, will compete for the top prize with Alcarràs, Cinco lobitos, La maternal i Model 77. Three female directors – one of them a debutante – and two directors born between 1971 and 1986 offer a social x-ray of recent Spain touching on themes such as motherhood, the crisis of the rural world, racism or the dark side of renewable energies, a wide thematic range that Tapia attributes to a generational change in direction and production.
“Just as there is a new generation of filmmakers, there is also a relief in production and more female presence. When I started, it was more rare, grandfathers, there were some pioneering producers who have not been recognized enough and who are now 60 and 70 years old, and now, of the five films nominated for the Goya, there is only one which is not produced by a woman, Model 77. In the rest, the majority of the team is female”, points out Sandra Tapia, from the Barcelona production company Arcadia.
“Now there is a generation of young female producers, and it is no coincidence that they want to tell other kinds of stories», he says.
And it is that, he emphasizes, producers “are creative people”. “The production is often only related to the money, which is a very important part, but we also accompany when deciding the most creative parts and whether the film works or not”, he points out.
He claims the figure of the “creative producer, who many times it is the origin and engine of the film’s ideas». “Sometimes very mature scripts arrive and we make them possible, but other times the spark jumps by reading a book, in the theater… the producer works to find the financing, but also he is the first to open the door and the last to close it in a film“, he explains, and lists the long list of tasks that production is responsible for: overseeing the script with the screenwriter, choosing the casting, doing the production design, thinking about the technical teams and distribution, marketing, festival strategy and sales abroad.
Bet on new voices
Since she started doing internships in a production company, still as a student of Audiovisual Communication until now, who is a partner in Arcadia, Sandra Tapia he has worked with established directors, such as Julio Medembut it has also seen filmmakers born to whom it gave his first chancelike Celia Rico, Goya in the novice direction by Trip to a mother’s room.
“The word is bet. Working with someone young is very laborious, because you have to accompany them more, but it is very satisfying because the producer-director relationship is very close”, he points out.
In addition to Rico, with whom he is already working on a second film, he also maintains a very solid bond with Paul Berger, with a third production together on the way. Folded they went forward snow whitewhich assumed one before and one after in the career of the two.
“Berger was the first to make me feel like a producer. We were a very small team and I naturally assumed that I was producing a film which then meant what it meant to both me and the company. Arcadia has gotten to where we are thanks to being brave enough to take a risk and make a film that it was very complex to finance and to defend before the industry and the public», he acknowledges about the film, which imitates the storytelling formula of silent cinema, in black and white and music as a driving element. The proposal, despite the risk, it took home ten Goyas and had an excellent reception on an international scale.
The three tapes of Claudia Llosa, among them The scared tit (Os d’Or and Berlin) o Mediterraneanabout the NGO Open Arms, are other “very dear projects” by Sandra Tapia, along with Sorogoyen’s last two films.
In a year in which the harvest of Spanish cinema is “spectacular”being among the nominees is already a prize, he declares, but he does recognize that, in addition to the team’s satisfaction, winning ends up being “useful”: “if the awards help anything, it’s to extend the life of films”.
«the beasts is still at the box office, a month will pass between the gala and its arrival on platforms, which is why having a good night at the Goyas helps bring more people to the cinema”, explains Sandra Tapia, who this 2023, in addition to the arrival at the rooms of the new Berger and Rico film productions he has another premiere on the agenda that will be announced: his first major series with Netflix, based on the crime of the Barcelona Urban Guard.
From Cannes to Japan and 700,000 spectators in Spain
the beasts premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and has won accolades in France – nominated for the César for best foreign film – but also in Japan, where it became the only film in the history of the Tokyo festival to win the awards for best film, director and leading actor. It is now awaiting release in countries such as Italy or Germany, but the production company from Celrà is optimistic and predicts “a great international journey to a super local story that touches on universal themes” after the success at the Spanish box office, in an exceptional year for auteur cinema in the creative field and audience figures.
“I think the public is not thanked enough. We come from a complicated time for distribution after the pandemic and we are in a very good creative moment in terms of what is explained and how it is explained, but we are also in an paradigm shift in the distribution and way of watching films», diu.
“What the beastswhich does not have a known casting in Spain – yes in France -, with an author’s staging, demanding for the public and without dubbed copiesbecause it is being watched in Galician, Spanish and Galician, around 700,000 spectators and 4.3 million euros in revenue… we didn’t even expect it ourselves”, he says. “The public is intelligent: if you give them good content and a movie to enjoy on the big screen, they respond”, he concludes.