Interwiew with Arantxa Echevarría

Yes, they have it more complicated, not only they do fight against the generalist society that is patriarchal and where we live the machismo day by day, but also fight with a culture in which the situation of women has always been bent to that of man, like previous generations. And besides, the gypsy community has not received the education that others have had, the lack of preparation forces them to maintain those cultural factors, which may not be the one they want, but they don't have the means nor access to change them. The gypsy tradition is complex, they have suffered a lot from us, the non-Gypsies, we have scorned them, we have walked over them and they have locked themselves more in their world, I understand, if I were gypsy I’d probably do the same, I would look with mistrust what is coming from outside. It is a revolution that Gypsy women have to lead. I have always tried to be very respectful of the gypsy culture but I have found that their adolescence is very ephemeral, when they turn 16 they are no longer required to study, they drop out of school and usually get engaged with a young man ... everything happens very fast, they immediately have children, Other experiences that we can have from different cultures have been lost.

Of course, I think it was Coixet who said, "To prove the same thing that man we have to work twice as much" I would add "and charge half." Nor is it a reflection of the generalist society, this happens in any company, the board of trustees is made by men, and when there is a woman it is because she is used to work with very masculine men. For example, in script, couples of women and men are formed and it is very difficult to see a woman alone like me. Somewhat it is a bleak picture, but it is still the reflection of society. Cinema is a piece of that society and it is reproduced in the same way.

The idea came from reality, living in Madrid I crossed with gypsies and for me they were great strangers, and I was very surprised not to know anything about them when they have been in Spain for 600 years. That was mixed with the fact that I wanted to talk about first love, which in the films has always been portrayed from a very masculine, very sexual point of view, very different from how I lived my first love that was more poetic, naïve. At 16 you still do not know what you want to do in life and suddenly you fall in love. And at that time, in 2009 I saw the news of the first gypsy lesbian couple who were getting married, they were on their backs, with fake names, and I thought, it took them five years to get married and now they have to hide. What would that love story of those two girls look like? That was the germ of "Carmen y Lola".

The cinema has to be very vocational. If is not very difficult, you have to be determined and love this profession. In my case it has been going on since I was little. in my house they were film lovers, I remember when I was 8 wanting to become a film director when I saw Bob Fosse's Cabaret, I didn't understand anything about the movie, but it fascinated me. I have always wanted to be a director, so I studied Communication but at that time it was all theoretical, nothing practical. Suddenly, in the third year I saw myself doing shorts with classmates, going out to the street to film, getting by and I didn’t even finish my Communication studies. Since I was 18, I started in this world and I have been lucky enough to stay until now. It is a miracle, because when I started, I spent 5 years without charge, going to shootings, working at figuration just to see a close-up shoot. These are things that we do what we love the cinema, you get into any mess where there is a camera to soak it up.

Yes, meeting Gabriel Velázquez, who is a film director quite unknown but for me it was vital. There was a time when I left and got to work in a company, so he called me to make a movie, I left a fixed salary, a stability, to get back into the cinema and made the movie Amateurs. And that return to the origins, to independent cinema, was like Why did I leave? I can't leave here, I have to stay here all my life. It was a completely positive experience, because he called me to do production management, when I had always worked as a director assistant, but I was fascinated by the process, seeing how everything is organized, going from scratch to having the movie finished.