The Colombian actress has lived in Spain for 23 years.
The presence of women in Spanish cinema is growing and more powerful and is in an “empowerment phase”, says the Colombian actress Juana Acosta who has lived in Spain for 23 years, a country with which she feels “immensely grateful”. .
Acosta, one of the special guests of the 62nd Cartagena de Indias International Film Festival (Ficci), stated in an interview with EFE that it is time to generate empathy, to seek equality, which “really is what we women have been working on since a long time ago”.
“It is working to seek equality in all aspects, that there is more female presence within the team heads in the audiovisual, that there are powerful female characters (because) after a certain age it seems that women disappear,” she says.
The actress does not deny that the “objectification” of women continues to exist in the cinema, but she sees that nowadays many are losing their fear of speaking.
“We are losing our fear of saying what we think, what we want and what we want” and “we are not afraid of denouncing either,” he says.
For Acosta, 46, the use of women is a reality “but we are on the path to breaking all those stereotypes. I think we have a long way to go but I think we are making progress.
With her sister Valentina, also an actress, she created the production company Calité Films in which she affirms that women will always be protagonists “because we are going through a very important moment of female empowerment and we had the need to move from complaint to action.”
A generous Spain
The actress confesses that since her childhood she always had a relationship with Europe and dreamed of working in France or Spain where she settled, a country that she says opened many doors for her in “a very generous way.”
«I have never felt any type of discrimination, quite the opposite, I feel that the contribution that we Latinos are making in the cinema in Europe or on television is enormous, and I think that this is happening more every day because the industry is globalizing» , said.
According to her, with the arrival of television and film platforms “there was a huge change and now what is happening is that actors from all over Latin America are being able to work in many parts of the world, and it is happening in Spain” where that It didn’t happen 20 years ago.
On the other hand, Acosta declared herself an admirer of France and recalled that she will shoot her next film there because it is a country that “respects the film industry, which highly respects the work of the actor, it is a country where the State itself clearly supports culture.” .
However, that does not prevent him from returning to Colombia where he was filming “On the Other Side of the Garden” last year, which is also the first film they produced for HBO with their production company Calité Films.
It is necessary to narrate not only the violence
Colombian and Latin American cinema is experiencing significant growth and Acosta says that this is noticeable “in the presence of Latin American films at major festivals and other important awards.”
However, he believes that in Colombia there has been an abuse when telling stories that are related to violence, to drug trafficking, “as if there were no more stories to tell, and I am sorry because living abroad that is what comes.”
Colombia is a country about which there is much to tell because it has “so much identity, with so much talent, that I find myself with stories that move away from violence, that move away from these issues and that have a lot of wealth.”
“I think the thing is to find a balance,” says Acosta, who assures that upon his return to Europe he will travel to France to shoot a film with a director who likes to work with improvisations and in French.
The actress concludes by pointing out that she is very excited about “the possibility of working from improvisations” because she believes that this “gives a lot of truth to the work.”
EFE