Ver a una mujer

Screening and discussion in Zumzeig between Mònica Rovira and Andrea Queralt

The producer Andrea Queralt and I studied at the same university: we share references and also friends. Based on Ver a una mujer, this talk will discuss the experience of making films, how we make the world with them and how to continue making them. 

Ver a una mujer (director’s notes):

When you see someone who dazzles you, you are suddenly filled with the other and stop seeing anything. You just intensely feel every moment that slips away. From uncertainty, feeling vulnerable, you search persistently for any glimpse of reality. By trying to see Sarai, I show here what emerges at the threshold of the gaze. 

This is a story linked to that which beats, breathes and escapes you, articulated from within based on images of a fragmented nature, in situations of fragility and confusion, typical of falling in love. 

I have constructed Ver a una mujer with the fractures, questions, voids and shadows that grow as we listen to the captured images. A subtle, precise, emotional thread architecture for a naked, head-on story that is born from what is lived, as real as I can be. 

Mònica Rovira, November 2017.

Andrea Queralt is film producer based in Paris, since 2015 she has been a member of the production company 4A4 Productions, from which she co-produced Pepe by Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias (Silver Bear at Berlinale, 2024), O que arde by Oliver Laxe (Jury Prize at Cannes Un Certain Regard, 2019), Sobre todo de noche by Víctor Iriarte (Venice Days, 2023), Matadero by Santiago Fillol (Locarno, 2022), and Avant la fin de l’été by Maryam Goormaghtigh (ACID, Cannes, 2017). She is currently producing the upcoming films by Oliver Laxe and Ben Rivers and is also the coordinator of FIDLab in Marseille. She was the French representative of Producers on the Move in 2020. She has given workshops for the Master in Creative Documentary Filmmaking at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra University, at Tabakalera (San Sebastián), at Márgenes (Madrid), at ESAV (Marrakech) and at the Harvard Film Study Centre.

Mònica Rovira is a filmmaker and researcher. Graduate in Audiovisual Communication and Master in Creative Documentary Filmmaking from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). Diploma in Film Directing from FAMU (Academy of Performing Arts, Prague). With Ver a una mujer (2017), she began investigating the tension between desire and writing, film language as a place from which to ask questions, the ways of narrating what happens to us. With a binding urge, she has established a triangular relationship with the other and with the camera. A practice that focuses on the vulnerability and temporality of bodies, as well as the spectral relations that wound, pass through and overwhelm images. She rehearses the writing of the self in film, shaping a voice in transit that questions identity. Them, the Water and Me (2024) is the research for a new film.