Ti Gong
The Spanish film “My Own Bathroom” will premiere at the 26th Shanghai International Film Festival and will compete for the top prize.
In the film, Antonia, a 65-year-old exemplary housewife, has a strange secret: she is obsessed with the bathroom, which is the only place where people will leave her alone if she says she is “busy.”
There she is free to pursue her true calling as a writer and escape the monotony of her life.
Director Lucía Casán Rodríguez says that one of the things she discussed with heroine Nuria González was whether they could find a private space for women in the house.
“Families may have a study, but it’s usually the man’s,” Rodriguez said, “so I thought of the bathroom. The bathroom is a great place to project a film, where we women can be alone and create.”
She said she wanted to express how, within a confined space, women can transcend the limitations of that space and experience a sense of self-liberation, a form of spiritual independence.
In the film, there are two worlds for Antonia: the real world she lives in, and the other is how she perceives her inner world.
During this process, she stepped out of the real world and into his inner world, creating the person he wanted to be and aspired to become, Rodriguez said.
However, as a woman, spending a lot of time alone can make you feel lonely.
She then has to return to her old home life and atmosphere, but by this point her family already sees her as an alien and treats her as if she were a foreigner.
So on a spiritual level, she wants to pursue self-actualization, but at the same time she wants validation from the physical world in which she exists.
She revealed that her next film will also be a female-themed film, primarily an inspiring film about young women.
“The protagonist is a young woman, 25 years old,” she says. “The film is centered around the theme of women and tells the story of three generations: her grandmother, her mother and this young woman.”
