The director of ‘Solas’ premieres in theaters ‘Lemon bread with poppy seeds’, a story of sisterhood “that pays tribute to urban and professional women”
Benito Zambrano (Lebrija, 1965) says that, as a boy, he was one of the few children who played on the scorched field or jump rubber with the girls at recess. “I was never a strong and skillful child, I never boasted of having the biggest one”, confesses the author of ‘Solas’, who has always been more interested in stories about women than those starring men. Zambrano was the youngest of seven siblings, four girls and three boys, and he remembers with emotion the days when he did not go to class and accompanied his mother to the market.
The universe of female confidences in the kitchen fueled the desire to tell stories of the Sevillian director, who this Friday, November 12, premieres in theaters ‘Lemon bread with poppy seeds’. Adaptation of the homonymous best seller by Cristina Campos, the film is a melodrama about sisterhood, in which a group of women form a family without men in a town in Mallorca. The protagonists are two sisters, a gynecologist who works as a cooperative and a bourgeois married to a man she does not love (Elia Galera and Eva Martín), who meet again thanks to a bakery they inherit in Valldemosa.
– Dedicate the film «to the women of my tribe». What are these women like?
–Different and varied, like all of us. From different times, places and social classes. They are women who go beyond my own family, I include friends and people with whom I have traveled in life. Women with whom I have established a bond of friendship and affection and have shared things. When one travels so much and no longer lives where he was born, the tribe concept is open, it has nothing to do with a place and a time.
– He is proud of being a town, his roots are always present.
–I am what I am because I come from where I come, that is my ancestry. My aristocratic blood is laborer and Andalusian. My family is my heritage, and that influences the way I tell stories. Although we all have the same thing – jealousy, love, pain, motherhood, fear of getting old when looking at ourselves in the mirror every morning – my way of feeling is not the same as that of an Englishman or a Frenchman. We Andalusians have Holy Week and the April Fair, drama and bacchanalian madness. We live on the extremes of emotions.
–’Lemon bread with poppy seeds’ exemplifies what sisterhood is.
–Sororidad … I had heard a lot Sister Angela, Sister María … I did my first communion and catechesis with little nuns, I loved them. Now that word has become fashionable, before ‘brotherhood’ was used. Support, help, which is what I have always lived in the world of women. Times have changed and women are the ones who create community, you see it in school, in how they help each other by picking up the children.
-Without the need for men, as in the movie.
-Effectively. We are less and less necessary as women are more independent and have more resources. Technology helps. I lived in a house without running water or a refrigerator and my mother had to go to the well to wash clothes. The woman has been able to free herself from many burdens and if she is financially independent, she can do whatever she wants with her life. She is also more active in cultural sectors and shows a greater desire to learn. I teach acting courses, and most of the students are women. Even being more prepared they continue to form, men are more arrogant and proud.
Elia Galera and Eva Martín in ‘Lemon bread with poppy seeds’.
– Do you think that those groups of spectators who have kept the cinemas open in the center of cities are going to return?
– Women are leading almost the entire world of social and cultural activism, they are the most active. I want everyone to go to the movies, not just women. I do not make a film for women, but for the public. I don’t look between the spectator’s legs, I tell stories for people. I do not want to be sectarian or sexist, I intend to excite everyone. At the Seville Festival we filled the Lope de Vega theater mostly with women. If ‘Solas’ was a tribute to rural and working women, this film is to urban and professional women.
“My aristocratic blood is a laborer and Andalusian, my family is my heritage”
“I do not make a film for women, but for the public, I intend to move everyone”
–’Solas’ will be 25 shortly. Few debut operas have had such an impact, he won five Goyas and put Andalusian cinema on the table.
– In this time we have gone from shooting one movie a year in Andalusia to having a small industry. Before the technicians had to come from outside and now we have them of the highest level. Andalusian cinema has grown, we deserved it. ‘Solas’ has not aged in some things. Loneliness in old age is a scourge that we are not going to get rid of, we are not preparing as a society to do well at the end of the road. And the world of women who choose to be single mothers has been gaining relevance, there are more and more. There is no one who does not tell me that he liked ‘Solas’, even among the new generations. I am happy to go through this life and leave a small mark in the form of a beautiful memory in the viewer.
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