The San Sebastian filmmaker has just become the first Spanish director to win the Golden Shell awarded by the San Sebastián Festival. He has achieved this thanks to his second feature film, ‘O Corno’, which is set on the Island of Arosa at the end of the Franco regime to accompany a midwife who is forced to escape to Portugal after the death of a teenager she has helped. to abort, and that in her journey she comes into contact with other women willing to help her. While staging this manifestation of sorority, Camborda confirms the ability to narrate through the contemplation of the landscape and bodies that he made clear in his debut work, ‘Arima’ (2019), and demonstrates an exceptional ability to move fluidly between genres and tones.
Several days have passed since ‘O Corno’ won the Golden Shell. Once you have overcome the understandable initial bewilderment, what interpretation do you make of the award now?
It makes me very happy, obviously, but I still can’t understand what it could mean for my professional career. I try to be realistic, and keep in mind that the award does not make me a better filmmaker than I was before winning it. But of course it’s giving me more visibility. To begin with, it has already considerably increased the number of Spanish cinemas in which my film will be shown. That’s good.
What does it mean to you to be the first Spanish director to obtain the award?
It’s not something you should be proud of, because it means that none of the first 70 Golden Shells went to a Spanish film directed by a woman. I trust that the day will soon come when no female artist will no longer be the first to achieve something, or when the number of women who make films will become news.
Its Golden Shell is also the first awarded to a Spanish film spoken in an official language of the Spanish State other than Spanish. And it comes at a time when official languages are at the center of the political debate. To what extent is shooting a film in Galician a political act?
It shouldn’t be, right? On paper, it is logical that a film shot and set in Galicia is spoken in Galician; The anomalous thing is that it continues to attract attention. That said, I believe that cinema is always ahead of politics in many ways and that, like any artistic form, it has the responsibility of being the spearhead, and has been normalizing the language for much longer than the Spanish State. Filming in Galician is political, of course. But the thing is, in cinema and in any act of creation, everything is political: the characters who star in the story, the time and place in which it takes place… Everything.
Would you say that ‘O corno’ proposes a vindication of the female body? Some of its most powerful scenes suggest as much.
As a filmmaker I need to tell stories that are intimately connected to my personal experiences and concerns. My main intention with the film has been to explore both the uncertainties that a woman can feel regarding her ability to conceive and the different consequences that she has when deciding to use it or not to use it; It is an issue, as I say, closely linked to my own experience with motherhood. In any case, I approached the process not as a search for answers but as an existential investigation, a reflection raised from a sensory and not a rational point of view.
Among these scenes, the one that opens the film stands out, which observes a birth and lasts almost 10 minutes. Why did you decide to start the film with her?
For me, this sequence is a declaration of intentions: the intention to put women at the center, and to pay attention to female sisterhood at a time, late Francoism, in which women continued to have to endure the lack of rights. and freedoms. Furthermore, in the history of cinema, births have hardly been portrayed fairly and realistically, in part because they have almost always been portrayed from the male gaze. I wanted to show a more mammalian and immersive birth, which more faithfully reflected the experience of giving birth, which is something eminently physical. I don’t think I would have portrayed it the way I have if I hadn’t experienced it myself firsthand.
‘O Corno’ premieres at a time when some are once again determined to take away women’s control over their own bodies. Also in that sense, especially in that, it is a political film.
Of course. The film takes place during the Franco era but there are only a few period signifiers in it, because I wanted to make it clear that the issues it deals with are not limited exclusively to the past. Franco’s repression reverberates in our present through what parties with retrograde ideology propose and are given political space. It is important to remember what it means to deny a woman the right to abort and, above all, to understand that women will always exercise control over our bodies, even if it is putting our lives in danger.
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‘O Corno’ arrives at a time when Spanish cinema is defined above all by the emergence of a new generation of women filmmakers, and by the diverse female perspectives that this brings. What do you think of that process?
I think it means repairing an injustice. The ability to make good films does not depend on gender, but until now women had barely been given the opportunity to tell our stories. I think that, currently, in society there is a great interest in listening to how women tell themselves, in part because for too long our reality has been explained from a man’s point of view. Be careful, I also believe that there are feminist men capable of telling powerful female stories from the male perspective. I resist opposing a female gaze and a male gaze because, in any case, we are talking about an incomprehensible multitude of gazes among both female and male directors. And the important thing is to do justice to that diversity, and celebrate it.