Amaia has just become a mother. To the pains, challenges, sufferings and gigantic vital changes that a baby brings, Amaia is added to the disappearance of her boy for work for weeks —so she is left alone with her day to day—, life in a large inhospitable city, the distance from her family and the abandonment of her profession by motherhood. Desperate, she returns to her maternal home in the Basque Country, where her parents do not live her best moments either, and where Amaia will discover some family secrets that have shaped her character. Of all this she goes five wolves, by the newcomer Alauda Ruiz de Azúa (Barakaldo, 42 years old), who has kicked off the Panorama section of the 72nd Berlinale with brio, and who has put together a curious diptych on motherhood with gem cloak, present in La Oficial, a film about the numerous disappearances in Mexico of people in drug trafficking areas, and about how mothers from different social classes face these absences, the work of another newcomer, the Bolivian-Mexican Natalia López Gallardo.
Ruiz de Azúa has been dedicated to advertising and short films for a long time. She also to motherhood. In five wolves there is all of that, in addition to a tone born “from how content Basque women are in their character”, and an analysis of “how each one deals with their affections”. Amaia, played by Laia Costa —actress who was also presented worldwide at a Berlinale, the one in 2015, thanks to the film Victory―, who had also been a mother, feels a brutal anxiety. “I also suffered from the problems of conciliation, older parents, and that is why I decided to explore this area in previous short films. And we continue the same, there is a lot of talk about conciliation and nothing is done. The pandemic has even made us go backwards, ”recalls the filmmaker. “Amaia, she remembers me emotionally, more than economically. Experiences of friends, stories from the park are added… When the urgent prevails over the important, we women lose. We pay the toll.”
The cinema begins to open up to motherhoods, “which move away from that cliché of a selfless and heroic mother, always in a secondary plane”. As the character of Ingrid García Jonsson said to her mother in beautiful youth, “no one warns how difficult this is.” The filmmaker confirms it: “It is a recurrent reflection among first-timers [risas]. When I started writing the script I felt that there were no complex stories on the subject. Now they have increased because the new generations have decided to portray these different motherhoods. But for years motherhood was lived as just another fact, without anyone explaining anything to you, diluting its importance when in reality it represents a radical change in your life.
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In five wolves, another layer is added, that of the mothers of previous generations. Amaia, an only child who has lived a long time away from her parents (played by Ramón Barea and Susi Sánchez), discovers the battlefield inhabited by her parents, in which nothing is spoken and everything is kept, until that sheltered pain it explodes and causes brawls. “As you grow up, you realize that your character and your affective relationships are largely explained by your family. As a teenager you affirm that you will never be like them, and with age and motherhood you discover that you are your mother and you understand her, ”recalls the director, who is already working on her next project. Amaia finally understands her mother, “she understands her and forgives her”, she will build herself at the end of five wolves her own motherhood, in a precise, moving and very clear portrait that will be released in Spanish commercial theaters on May 20.
Murder as a daily occurrence in Mexico
When violent death has entrenched itself as one more vital element in a society, there is little room for hope. In Mexico, organized crime has caused a society without hope. “More than violence or drug trafficking, the film talks about the fear that can be generated in a society where there is no common project, where people are adrift, where they only want to save their skin and nobody thinks about the common good”, he tells about gem cloak its director, Natalia López Gallardo (La Paz, 41 years old).
López Gallardo makes his big debut with gem cloak, who directs, writes and edits. It is also true that the Mexican-Bolivian has a long career behind her as film editor for Amat Escalante, Lisandro Alonso and her husband, Carlos Reygadas. And she, as a director, she and she competed at the 2007 Cannes Critics’ Week with the short film in the sky like on earth. In gem cloak portrays how this violence is destroying all Mexican social classes, and how it is especially suffered by women, the only ones who still harbor an iota of solidarity. Why this movie? Why hasn’t he debuted before or with another song? “Because a very powerful impulse is needed, a need and that need must be strong enough to lead you to do it”, the director told in Berlin. “In my case, it came from the land where I have lived for 13 years, in Morelos, and it was the people who inspired me.”
His gem cloak it plays on the terrain of Escalante (although with less explicit violence) and Reygadas in its visual abstraction, in its fragmented narration, but it provides a piety that is not found in the cinema of those filmmakers. And that give it a powerful added value.
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