“Were you in that series?” “Are you anorexic?” “What are you doing here if you won so much money?” in a scene from selftape, the autobiographical series that premiered this week on Filmin and co-written and co-starred by the sisters Joana and Mireia Vilapuig, a teenager ridicules Joana for having set up a theater workshop at her high school years after having been the most famous girl in Catalonia. Everyone knows that Joana starred in vermelli bracelets, TV3 fiction about a group of boys hospitalized for different reasons, from disorders with self-perception and body image (TCA) to leukaemia. An unprecedented phenomenon between 2011 and 2013 and not only in Catalan territory. Its chapters would reach three million viewers in its jump to Antena 3 as Red Bracelets and moved even Steven Spielberg, who bought the rights for its adaptation to the US market to create red band society (2015), a version of the ABC channel that had the Oscar winner Octavia Spencer in its cast.
That uncomfortable sequence in that educational center, like a good part of what happens in the six 30-minute episodes directed by Bàrbara Farré and produced by Filmax with the Filmin Original label, happened just as it was in reality. Because in selftape Exactly that is explored. What remains after two prodigy sisters from Sabadell become so famous that they cannot take the metro with their parents without getting overwhelmed. What happens when, a decade later, there is no longer a trace of that effervescence and interest and they have to see themselves competing among themselves for a role. And, above all, what happens when you feel that “you have stolen your sister’s dream of being an actress” [Joana]” and, suddenly, the directors (men) prefer you (Mireia).
Fiction and videotapes
With a narrative that mixes fact and fiction, including real clips from his media archive or the familiar VHS of his childhood, selftape —which is what the self-recording of remote casting is called that allows directors to make a first selection without having to organize a face-to-face one—, part of a real anecdote that happened in 2015 to these sisters who are now 28 years old (Joana ) and 25 (Mireia). “We saw ourselves recording each other for the same role after a lot of drought after the boom of Polseres. There we already joked that with that alone we had material for a series, but until 2019 we didn’t take it seriously”, explains Joana, sitting next to her sister in the Filmin offices in the upper area of Barcelona after an intense day of promotion. and a few days after presenting the series at the Malaga festival.
It was mixing their domestic archive with their television interviews at their height of fame and these sisters clicked to launch into telling their story: “Putting together that puzzle impressed us a lot. It was the first time we saw the transition from childhood happiness to becoming a public figure. Going through all those terrible interviews where we just wanted to run away and where we always made a ‘what the hell are you asking me’ face to go directly to the cut of the selftape from ‘hello, I don’t have a job and I’m here selling my motorcycle to a camera’ made us understand that it was very powerful material for a series”, sums up Mireia. Her story, indeed, gave for one.
sisters and rivals
Joana knew that she would be an actress for as long as she can remember, but she had to witness how her little sister, who did not care about the artistic world, triumphed in a casting in which she participated with almost a thousand other Catalan girls. It was Mireia who, at the age of ten, took over the role of Christ in heroes (Heroes), the film by Pau Freixas written by Albert Espinosa that paid homage to the goonies and Count on me narrating the friendship of a group of children in a summer that would mark his life.
From that prodigious casting, in which Mireia was the only girl in the group, came the cast of boys who would make up vermelli bracelets with the same team in the direction and script. Only this time, Mireia was too small for the role of Cristina. Joana, now yes, would be the chosen one. She would also have to suffer from the smurfette syndrome: she was the only girl in that group of kids who triumphed in full hormonal explosion and went on to adolescence. Joana became famous (Mireia would come to participate in the series) and fate meant that that promise of success did not hold for either of them, beyond participation in series and films such as Tell me either palm trees in the snow.
That latent rivalry, that constant comparison and confrontation in a mirror deformed by the family bond is the emotional engine of the series. One that exposes, without complacency, a relational acrimony (very plausible) between the sisters. “Mireia has what Joana doesn’t have and Joana what Mireia doesn’t have. They both have to move away to meet again and understand that they work like ying and yang”, clarifies Joana. And Mireia adds that her sister was not acting when she tells her in an episode “I have realized that I am not happy by your side.” She was already prepared to hear that reproach. “When we recorded, we already knew what we were going for. Before shooting we did a very emotional job. We talk a lot about our relationship to understand each other, to know what we provoke and to be able to interpret it in a realistic and sincere way”, the two say, with an innate ability to finish each other’s sentences.
The wound of abuse
Although part of the family plot is built on fiction — “everything that refers to our parents and the environment of friends is not real, we needed to protect them in this brutal exhibition of our privacy,” says Joana -, selftape is delicate and intelligent evidence in the form of a self-portrait of the ravages of an audiovisual culture in which actresses are exploited, even when they are minors, alluding to the myth of a creative genius to legitimize the abuse.
In the series, nobody gets away unscathed: casting directors who ask you if you have had an abortion and what you learned if you did, even though that experience has nothing to do with the role you are going to play. Directors who in rehearsals demand you nudes and perform a false eroticism that contributes nothing to the narrative or that they throw you out one day before starting to shoot because you are not “sensual enough” or “confident of yourself”. Carry on with your career assuming the nightmare that one of the sex scenes you shot in a movie is endlessly uploaded to porn platforms as if it were a sex tape.
Wounds that are complemented by abuses outside the world such as stealthing (the removal of the condom in a non-consensual manner during the sexual act). “All women, to some extent, have experienced this type of situation. We, as actresses, have suffered a lot from the male gaze. Many times we have felt very puppets and very vulnerable in front of these creators who only want to vampirize your pain and your wounds. We wanted to show how hostile all this can be”, says Joana. Mireia supports her: “Now it’s another world thanks to the intimacy coordinators, but we had been filming for a long time and assuming a type of formula for sex scenes in which we have been unprotected,” she explains.
The clips in which the girls are interviewed are so uncomfortable to review that even one of the screenwriters who has participated in selftapeIvan Mercadé, who was a producer of Vermelles Polserscame to reveal in the presentation of the project how his body was left in front of the media file of that treatment of those who were only pups: “I felt guilty.”
The jail of the “girl series”
Drawing inspiration from creative women like Michaela Coel with I could destroy you (HBO) or Siri Seljeseth with Young & Promising (available on Filmin) and with a “very intimate and European” aesthetic, the Vilapuigs lament that their series suffers from that prophecy that, despite totally opposite invoices and meanings, locks them in “the same box” as series like Thistle either Self defense.
“We are three totally different series, why does nobody compare us with Nacho, which also stems from the experiences and experiences of an actor?” Mireia asks herself. “It bothers me a lot to live inside this box of women, as if there could only be one series. It’s like Young & Promisingwho sold it as the Girls Norwegian. But if everything is Girlsnothing is Girls“, says.
After these six episodes set in Barcelona and Olso and in which Catalan, Spanish and English are heard, the two sisters are still without work. Mireia just did a selftape without much hope. “Sometimes I take it as: ‘come on, get rid of it and do it already’”. Joana does not rule out starting with a new series of episodes: “The same in a decade from now, at 40. Then surely we will have again selftape the sea of interesting”.
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