As Víctor Erice did with Ana Torrent 50 years ago, Estibaliz Urresola has found in a girl from Basauri the soul of ‘20,000 species of bees’
It is inevitable to remember Ana Torrent’s eyes after seeing little Sofía Otero in ‘20,000 species of bees’. Fifty years ago, Víctor Erice found in the gaze of a six-year-old girl all the surprise that childhood holds while the little protagonist of ‘The Spirit of the Beehive’ attends the screening of ‘Frankenstein’ by James Whale. Erice has always defended that this scene is the best he has ever shot. The shadow of that masterpiece, a clairvoyant parable of the repression during the Franco regime, is projected onto the debut feature by Estibaliz Urresola, which, as the director herself jokes, could perfectly be titled ‘The Spirit of the Beehive’, but the filmmaker from Carranza stole the title.
Like Ana Torrent, Sofía Otero had never been in front of a camera before. She was the first girl that Urresola tested in a casting attended by more than five hundred little girls. The director was clear that she needed an actress and not an actor, because Aitor / Cocó / Lucía feels like a girl and wants to be treated as such, even if she pees standing up and they take her to the men’s changing rooms at the pool in the town . On that first day of casting, Sofía got precisely the role of one of the youngsters who play in the pool. Intelligent, cheerful and outgoing, this basauritarra who was eight years old on the set (now nine) won over Urresola for her ability to improvise and get into the games. After doing five hundred tests, the director realized that she had the same look in her that Erice was looking for, that of innocence, discovery and helplessness.
Never before in the 73-year history of the Berlinale had the acting award gone to someone so young. For two editions, the German festival has awarded a single gender-neutral prize for the best performances, without distinction between men and women; there is a Silver Bear for the leading role and another for the supporting role. This characteristic that all the international festivals of category A will end up adopting acquires a greater importance in ‘20,000 species of bees’, the chronicle of the reaffirmation of identity of a girl in whom, rather than transforming herself, who seems to have it very clear, they do so those around you. Aitor / Cocó / Lucía, the name that appears on her ID, what others call her and what she wants to be called, is present in 90% of the scenes in the film. She doesn’t transition, but throughout the film she acquires the tools to express who she is. The one that ‘transitions’ is the family.
trans law
Up to four feature films have addressed transsexuality in this edition of the Berlinale. The Burgos philosopher Paul B. Preciado uses Virginia Woolf’s novel in ‘Orlando, my political biography’ to build bridges between the present and the past; the German thriller ‘Bis ans Ende der Nacht’ unites a policeman infiltrated in a drug trafficking network and a trans woman; the Colombian documentary ‘Transfariana’ pairs a trans prostitute and an imprisoned FARC guerrilla; and Estibaliz Urresola reminds us in his debut feature, which will hit theaters on April 21, that the gaze of others is essential in building the idea of who we are. In the same way that a stone thrown into a pond causes a wave to reach the shore, the shock wave of a burning reality in our country thanks to the Trans Law explodes on the screens.
Half a century ago, Víctor Erice stole the title of ‘The spirit of the hive’ from a book about the life of bees written by the poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, which alluded to that enigmatic and powerful instinct of insects that men cannot they could understand. That family of Erice in a state of lethargy, drowned in a therapeutic hermeticism, finds its echo in Lucía’s parents, who witness the collapse of their relationship. For Urresola, bees are a symbol of diversity, the creators of that malleable wax with which Patricia López Arnaiz’s character creates sculptures after having recovered her vocation as an artist and the healing instrument used by the beekeeper aunt she gives life Anne Gabarain. Bees as an endangered species and as a basic element in Basque folklore and religiosity, hence the presence of the ‘argizaiolas’ or matchstick holders in Spanish, with which the dead are held.
#Sofias #innocent