Icíar bollain

Icíar Bollaín Pérez-Mínguez (Madrid, June 12, 1967) is a Spanish director and actress.

Biography

Icíar Bollaín Pérez-Mínguez is the daughter of an aeronautical engineer and a music teacher, and has a twin sister named Marina. The current director made her debut as an actress at the age of 15 and was chosen a year later, at 16 years old, by Víctor Erice, a renowned Spanish film director, to star in his first film, El sur. From then on, she starred in different feature films, a television series ( Miguel Servet, the blood and the ashes ) and an opera. She enrolled in Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid, to later abandon her studies in order to dedicate herself entirely to cinema.She is fond of impressionist painting and likes to paint portraits.

In early 1991, together with Santiago García de Leániz and Gonzalo Tapia, he founded Producciones La Iguana, with whom he took his first steps in the field of directing. Baja corazón (1993) and Los amigos del muerto (1994) were some of his first works in this field. La Iguana has produced almost twenty films since its creation.

In 1995, Icíar took a turn in his career when he decided to accompany director Ken Loach, with whom he had worked on Tierra y libertad (1995), during the filming of La canción de Carla (1996), to write a book about the English director and his work entitled Ken Loach, a supportive observer, published in 1996 by the publishing house El País-Aguilar.

She was chosen Best Spanish Actress in 1992 by the magazine Cartelera Turia and received the Ojo Crítico II Milenio Award from Radio Nacional de España in 1993. She also received the Ciudad de Cuenca Award for her career in the II Film Festival 'Women in Direction' from the capital of Cuenca. She is a member of the Spanish Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences. In 2006 she founded, together with other filmmakers, CIMA (Association of Women Filmmakers and Audiovisual Media), and since then she has been a member of its Board of Directors.

The director considers cinema a very powerful tool to achieve social transformation and the creation of a more egalitarian society,

Currently, she is dating Scottish screenwriter Paul Laverty, a regular screenwriter for Ken Loach's films, whom she met while filming Land and Liberty and with whom she has three children.

Representative feature films

Flowers from Another World (1999)

This is a great film that can also be seen as a teaching medium for foreign students, as it shows several key aspects of both the history of Spain and the socio-cultural evolution of the country.

This tells the story of the Cuban Milady, the Dominican Patricia and the Bilbao Marirrosi, three women with existential problems and various concerns regarding their future. Their problems are similar to those suffered by three young men from a town in the province of Guadalajara, Santa Eulalia, a small town without marriageable women, and condemned to oblivion. Soon, Damián, Alfonso and Carmelo will come into contact with the three women through a party organized by the bachelors of the town in which they will meet each other, beginning a bittersweet story of coexistence.

This cinematographic work is useful from an academic point of view, not only because of its previously mentioned historical base, but also because it is presented as an open window that allows the viewer to put themselves in the place of the characters at all times, suffering with they the same surprises and impressions, from the arrival of the girls to Santa Eulalia.

Another of the essential aspects of the film is that it offers the opportunity to understand another of its main points: the problems of the Spanish countryside. At the same time, Icíar Bollaín is in charge of preserving the classic stereotypes of the typical Spanish town where the bar is the most respected forum for meetings and defenses, even ideological ones.

However, Bollaín does not leave behind the important issue of sexism prevailing at the time reflected, although he is also concerned with mitigating it to a large extent with the introduction of characters such as Doña Gregoria, mother of one of the young people of the town and a reflection of the rural matriarchy.

Foreignness, we must not forget, is another of the key points in this story. The feeling of strangeness and rejection of what is alien and foreign, which is presented at the beginning of the film with the arrival of the three girls in the town, gradually fades as the love affairs between them and the young natives of Santa Eulalia develop.. This is a clear solution to the problem of foreignness, since Icíar Bollaín does not present a problem without its corresponding solution, introducing an integrating ideology that breaks with cultural and racial barriers, another important pillar of the feature film that constitutes a recognized pedagogical intention.

The fact that Bollaín frames the film in the middle of the real estate bubble in Spain is not something fortuitous either, since it is another aspect that will serve to show many aspects and historical consequences that, even today, directly affect the Spanish society (a clear example would be the cases of corruption that plague the country).

In short, in terms of teaching, Flowers from another world allows us to analyze not only the racial issue but also the role of women at the time. This could even be compared with other similar cases in which the woman is the object and reason for the start of a movement for social integration, as is the case of the Mexican woman emigrant to the United States. All this portrayed through the figures and personalities of the three women who star in this story.

I Give You My Eyes (2003)

This film is characterized by introducing a new element: painting. The use of pictorial art enriches the staging and the story itself, analyzing the narrative function that works of this style can have within cinematography.

Although painting does not play a main role in the story of Pilar, a victim of gender violence, the progress of the cinematographic story is crucial for the development of the protagonist. Thus, this new element will work more as a guiding thread than as the main narrative axis.

Somehow, through the plane of the painting, it is observed throughout the entire feature how Pilar is freeing herself from the ties that chain her to that life of violence and mistreatment that her husband offers her. As Icíar Bollaín herself said so well: «Pilar meets art and it is from there that she begins to grow, to escape from her confinement», a lesson and example that many women who suffer the same sentence could take as a reference to get out of the battered woman's hole and free herself from those chains for good, as Pilar does well during the film.

However, it should be noted that throughout the film not only one painting is dealt with or taken as a reference, but different paintings (especially mythological ones) are used that will turn out to be a reflection of the development of the protagonist through personal and social level. On one occasion, the viewer can even establish a clear relationship between the figure of Orpheus and that of Pilar's husband, so that the painting serves as a mirror of all the characters in a certain way.

Also the Rain (2010)

This feature film by Icíar Bollaín could be perfectly defined as a “film within a film”, since it makes use of the use of two plot lines to narrate the tense situation in Bolivia, all of it anchored and closely related to inheritance and the colonial legacy.

On the one hand, the film takes place, in turn, the filming of a low-budget film about Christopher Columbus and the discovery of America in 1492. While, in parallel, the famous water war is taking place of Cochabamba that took place in April 2000.

What Icíar Bollaín intends to represent through the use of a historiographical discourse, somewhat unfaithful to reality, and filmic fiction is the relationship between the event that marked the history of the West in 1492 and the development of the country in which it took place. frames this event.

To do this, however, the director will be inventive, disrupting historical reality in such a way that it is possible to equate it, in a certain way, with all that this has entailed throughout the history of South America.

Social work

In 2012, Icíar Bollaín wrote and directed a short film to show the work of Aldeas Infantiles SOS and the vulnerability of a large number of children in Spain, called 1,2,3... CASA. In it, he shows, in just ten minutes, the work of the NGO and highlights the precarious and defenseless situation to which thousands of children in Spain are subjected. The short revolves around the testimonies of some of the young people who have spent their childhood in Children's Villages and is also supported by the statements of the SOS Mothers.

SOS Children's Villages is a non-profit organization whose purpose is to guarantee a decent childhood for children who are immersed in poverty, which is why it is dedicated to helping orphaned, abandoned children or whose families cannot take care of them. giving them the opportunity to grow fully within a family, known as the "SOS family", which is based on four basic figures:

• Mother SOS, who lives in the same house and is with the child 24 hours, responsible for feeding, caring for and educating him.
• The brothers.
• Home.
• The SOS children ' s village, which consists of an average of 6 to 12 families, allows children to foster social contacts for their development and serves as a bridge to society.

The short film 1,2,3...CASA was presented in Madrid on December 13, 2012. The event was attended by the president of Aldeas Infantiles SOS in Spain, Pedro Puig, and the president and founder of the advertising agency El Laboratorio, Carlos Holemas. There were also the SOS mothers who care for the children in the children's villages and some young people who grew up cared for by the NGO and who have become protagonists of the video.

Filmography as an actress

Feature films

• South (Victor Erice, 1983)
• The two shores (John Sebastian Bollaín, 1986)
• The stalking (Gerardo Herrero, 1987)
• As long as there's light (Philipe Vega, 1987)
• Evil (Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, 1989)
• Venice (Pablo Llorca, 1989)
• The Best of Times (Philipe Vega, 1990)
• Doubts of eight (Andrés Linares, 1990)
• Sublet (Chus Gutiérrez, 1991)
• One umbrella for three (Philipe Vega, 1992)
• Between (Santiago García de Leániz, 1992)
• Tell me a lie (John Sebastian Bollaín, 1993)
• Touching background (José Luis Cuerda, 1993)
• Hanging gardens (Pablo Llorca, 1993)
• Earth and freedom (Ken Loach, 1994)
• The roof of the world (Philipe Vega, 1995)
• Less than zero (Ernesto Tellería, 1996)
• Nobody. (José Luis Borau, 1997)
• Subjudice (Josep Maria Forn, 1997)
• Leo (José Luis Borau, 2000)
• Sara, a star (José Briz Méndez, 2002)
• They look at us. (Norberto López Amado, 2002)
• The stone raft (George Sluizer, 2003)
• The night of the brother (Santiago García de Leániz, 2005)
• Rabia (Sebastián Cordero, 2010)

Short film

• Powder in love (Javier López Izquierdo, 1990)
• 24 lies (2012)

Filmography as a director

Feature films

• Hello, are you alone? (1995)
• Flowers of another world (1999). Best Critic Week Film at the Cannes Festival.
• I give you my eyes (2003). Goya to the Best Film at the Film Academy Awards.
• Mataharis (2007)
• Also rain (2010)
• Kathmandu, a mirror in the sky (2011)
• In strange land (2014) (documentary)
• The olive (2016)
• Yuli (2018)
• Rosa's wedding (2020)
• Maixabel (2021)

Short Films

• Lower, heart (1993)
• The friends of the dead (1994)
• Loves that kill (2000). Germen of your film I give you my eyes.
• Travel with my grandmother (2002)
• There's reason! (segment) For your own good2004)
• 1, 2, 3... CASA (2012)
• Become a stranger (2013)

Music Videos

• Break of the album "Dramas y Caballeros", by Luis Ramiro (2009)

Documentaries

• In strange land (2014)

Writings

• Ken Loach, a solidarity observer. Madrid, El País-Aguilar, 1996.

Awards and recognitions

Goya Awards

Medals of the Film Writers Circle

Cannes International Film Festival

San Sebastian International Film Festival

Huesca International Film Festival

Other awards

• Public Award at the Nantes 2019 Spanish Film Festival for Your Film Yuli.

• In 2018 he received the VI State Social Work Award, in the form of media and audiovisual media. For their social commitment and public denunciation, in favor of human rights.

• In 2017 Clece presented the Commitment Awards in its III edition and Icíar Bollaín received the special mention "for the important role of film as a vehicle to portray and generate awareness about the social problem of gender-based violence".

• In 2021 she received the Women in Film Award, awarded by Women in Film.

• Gold Medal to Merit in the Fine Arts (2021).