The Film Academy has reported the death at the age of 65, victim of a brain tumor, of the director and screenwriter Patricia Ferreira, director of feature films such as 'I Know Who You Are', 'The Impatient Alchemist' and 'The Wild Children'. Ferreira was part of the board of directors of the Film Academy from 2009 to 2015 and in the last two decades she taught directing classes at the Film School of the Community of Madrid (ECAM).
Of Galician origins although born in Madrid in 1958, Ferreira graduated in Image Sciences and Journalism from the Complutense University of Madrid. She worked as a journalist and film critic at Radio Nacional de España and the magazine 'Fotogramas' and in the 90s she was the director of various Spanish Television programs: the series 'Equinoccio', 'A country in the backpack', with José Antonio Labordeta touring Spain, and 'Paraísos cerca', another travel program with scripts by Rafael Chirbes and Javier Marías.
His feature film debut came in 2000 with 'I Know Who You Are'. Ana Fernández, Miguel Ángel Solá and Roberto Enríquez starred in “an exercise to not lose memory” of a time as close as the Transition. The film, which combined political intrigue with a love story, narrated the meeting of a young psychiatrist and a patient victim of a strange form of amnesia, Korsakof's syndrome, which prevents retaining any immediate memory.
'I know who you are' earned Ferreira the Goya nomination as a new director and won the statuette for best soundtrack by José Nieto. Two years later she premieres 'The Impatient Alchemist', an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Lorenzo Silva with the most unique pair of detectives in Spanish fiction: the Civil Guard agents Rubén Bevilacqua and Virginia Chamorro.
Under the guise of a criminal entanglement, 'The Impatient Alchemist' warned about one of the evils that afflict society, the desire for profit. According to Ferreira, “even the most honorable people sell themselves for a little more money.” Judges, builders, nuclear power plants and Russian gangsters make up the landscape through which the protagonists travel.
Fernando Fernán Gómez and Marta Etura starred in 'So that you don't forget me', the director's third feature film, which changed the thriller for the daily drama of a family in today's Madrid. A separated middle-aged woman lives with her son, an architecture student, and her father, an elderly vitalist who lost his family in the Civil War. The young man finds his only support in his grandfather in the face of his mother's hostility, reluctant to the affair that the boy has with a supermarket cashier.
'So that I don't forget' was well received at the Berlin Festival and was nominated for three Goyas. In 2012, Patricia Ferreira won the Malaga Festival with 'The Wild Children', a story about adolescent confusion that served as a metaphor for turbulent times. The director follows three friends who suffer from a hostile environment at school and their family. They yell at their teachers, chat and have a drink. They are the daughter of a wealthy family, the rebel from an environment in crisis and the introvert subdued by the father. They are not marginal characters nor do they suffer tremendous adventures.
«The title is an irony, it can lead to thinking about broken families, drugs and juvenile delinquency. We have all been the same as these kids, what happens is that we have forgotten,” warned the director, who chatted with kids in schools and parks to write the script with Virginia Yagüe. Álex Monner, Albert Baró and Marina Comas starred in this fiery defense of the quiet work of so many teachers.
«These teachers are heroes. That's why when I hear the Government talk about adjustments in education for greater efficiency I think how wrong they are. Public education needs twice as much money, we are risking the future of the country,” defended Ferreira, who helped found and was part of the board of directors of CIMA, Association of Women Filmmakers and Audiovisual Media.
'Thi Mai: Rumbo a Vietnam' was the last feature film by Patricia Ferreira in 2017, a comedy with a stellar cast – Carmen Machi, Dani Rovira, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón and Adriana Ozores–, in which Machi played a woman from Pamplona who loses his only daughter in an accident and travels to Vietnam to look for the adopted daughter he had been granted before the tragedy. Filmed in the Asian country, Ferreira's fifth feature film wanted to ingratiate popular comedy with themes such as sexist oppression, single-parent families and mourning the death of a child.
Her latest work has been the creation of the Spanish Television series 'The Lawyers', directed these days by Juana Macías and Polo Menárguez, and which is based on the real life in Madrid in the late 60s and 70s of four young lawyers. : Cristina Almeida, Manuela Carmena, Lola González and Paca Sauquillo. Married to the critic Fernando Lara, former director of Seminci, with whom she had a daughter, Patricia Ferreira always denounced the neglect of women in artistic creation. She did it through associations or in documentaries like 'Señora de', with testimonies from several generations of women who were not allowed to dream.
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