Director Alauda Ruiz de Azúa talks to actor Ramón Barea about ‘Cinco lobitos’, her motherhood debut that ravaged the Malaga festival
Ramón Barea (Bilbao, 1949), three children and five grandchildren, was a showbiz and nomadic father, who often experienced the feeling of “guilt and guilt” for being away from home. Director Alauda Ruiz de Azúa (Barakaldo, 1978) has a six-year-old boy and ‘also deals with feelings of guilt’ when she questions herself as a mother. ‘Cinco lobitos’, his feature film debut starring Barea, talks about all this, which ravaged the Malaga festival and hit theaters on May 20.
The film tells the misfortune of a new and aging mother (Laia Costa), who leaves Madrid and returns to the city on the Basque coast where she grew up to live temporarily with her parents (Susi Sánchez and Ramón Barea). You will then have to take care of your baby, but also your parents. Actor and director talk in Bilbao about the benefits and woes of motherhood and the weight of family legacy, the other big theme of one of the year’s Spanish films.
–Have you ever thought about what kind of father and mother they have been?
– Ramon Barea: I’ve made that thought more than once. I married very young and had my children very often; now in their 40s they could almost be my gang. My teenage sweetheart, who was the mother of my children, died after we broke up. Suddenly they were completely orphaned, the father was far away and the mother disappeared. I was able to do theater because my partner gave me that opportunity. I have a sense of guilt and guilt. You wonder how it should have been and I’m not sure because in all artistic activities there is some sacrifice.
–Alauda Ruiz de Azua: I live with this juggling. You always think of yourself as a father or as a mother, you keep wondering if you could do things differently. The day by day eats you up and you dissolve the week, the month… Ultimately, all mothers and fathers deal with guilt. I listened to you, Ramón, and I thought there are also absent fathers who work in offices, that doesn’t necessarily happen in the artistic world. The complicated part is the filming, which is very engaging. To be compatible with the brokerage would require money that is not feasible in an independent Spanish production.
–RB: I had the support of my grandmother and the community nursery. And I slept at home, my adventure in Madrid is very late, my first film, ‘La fuga de Segovia’, I made when I was thirty years old. Nor have I subjected my children to a very radical divorce.
–ARA: You didn’t have these conversations about family models and reconciliation in your day. There was no postpartum depression, many things were taken for granted.
–RB: You made no provisions, you lived for rent. Life marked the way for you, I couldn’t stop organizing my life. It was like smoking: you smoked and that’s it, only later do you wonder why the hell you did it.
–ARA: You were a very young father, we put it off a lot. These days we make a lot of predictions and the public appreciates things like seeing a mother feel uncomfortable breastfeeding or the baby falling. That every day.
– Was it easier in the past?
– AR: I do not think so. We respond to the family models we’ve had.
–RB: I see it in the young company of Pavilion 6, the new generations are born feminists, it seems normal to them. You are an archaic, macho and authoritarian grandfather, who speaks nonsense. I wasn’t born with those coordinates that I share, it’s very hard for me to get rid of all the generational mistakes I carry around. I envy them, but it scares me when that vision of life is used as a throwing weapon against previous generations.
–ARA: It is not so much a throwing weapon, but to reconsider ourselves from now on. In the film, there is compassion in the portrayal of the father. The mother says a phrase that many people identify with: “Your father has been a good father and a worthless husband.” It defines the profile of the man of a generation. He’s not a villain, he just hasn’t had the tools or an emotional upbringing that hasn’t been built overnight.
-The protagonists of the film can only be Basque.
–ARA: It’s funny, because the film has been seen in Berlin, Malaga, Barcelona… And a lot of people have approached me to tell me: my mother is just like Begoña. Yes, there’s an enclosed character, the thing comes from the north, but I think it’s a universal dynamic.
–’Five Little Wolves’ tells how one day we found ourselves talking like our father, even though we don’t like it.
–RB: Children inherit what they have seen you do, for better or for worse. Now you can give them the lessons you want, that what they see is what they have left.
–ARA: When you are a father or mother, you realize how affectively you mark a person, how it can condition him or her. You can have the fantasy that you are different from your parents, that you can escape that. But the time will come when you will realize that you are like them. It is very difficult to escape the family. In time you understand that it was a sign of affection when they told you to be strong.
– Ramón, what advice did you give Alauda?
–RB: I met a human being instead of a film director, someone with a sensitivity who spoke to me about family. The first meeting was similar to this conversation, we don’t talk about cinema, but about life. I am very obedient and tried to be complicit. Later, when I saw the film, I discovered things I was not aware of when I was shooting it. This film has a very special sensitivity.
–ARA: You were very generous from the start, Ramón. I learned from you the importance of looking at the characters with humanity and compassion. Try to understand them. And be open to things that happened on set.
Source: La Verdad
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