Toronto Title ‘Sisters,’ Starring Spain’s Elena Anaya and Emma Suarez, Forces a Family to Visit Fears and Taboos

“Sisters” (“Hermanas”) will have its world premiere in the Discovery section of the Toronto International Film Festival, running September 10-20.

Written and directed by Ione Hernández Sáenz (“1% Schizophrenia”) and starring Elena Anaya (“The Skin I Live In,” “Room in Rome”) and Emma Suárez (“Julieta,” “The Next Skin”), the Spanish film is an intergenerational family drama dealing with accusations of sexual assault during the San Juan Festival outside Madrid, where the two sisters’ families are welcoming the summer solstice. Choosing to focus less on the details of the assault and more on how each family member deals with the unexpected tragedy, the film explores the universal themes of love, guilt and trauma.

“I was immediately drawn to the film’s emotional maturity and precision. With remarkable subtlety and depth, it creates the perfect space for Elena Anaya and Emma Suárez to deliver extraordinary performances. This confident debut reveals a distinctive new filmmaking voice from Ione Hernández Sáenz, and I’m delighted to collaborate with such a talented director. We can’t wait to share this film with international audiences,” said Pamela Leu, CEO/Head of Sales for Be For Films, who handles international sales for the film.

The film is produced by Noesno Film Aie, Solita Films, Gariza Films, Elastica Films and ISB Films.

Watch the “Sisters” exclusive clip below:

Variety interviewed director Ione Hernández Sáenz ahead of the film’s world premiere on Sept. 15.

You wrote and directed “Sisters.” Why did you choose this particular story to tell as your fiction debut?

Ione Hernández Sáenz: Sometimes you don’t choose. Out of nowhere, you find yourself thinking about a conversation, a story a friend has told you. Then you read something that, for whatever reason, connects to what you’ve heard, and this goes on until one day you decide to bring all of that out and take it towards the things that interest you, which in my case are always emotional journeys within close-knit circles, such as family, a group of friends, a work group. These are places where it is harder to be completely at peace because those bonds always bring unresolved things in each of us to the surface. I’m interested in seeing what happens with all these shifts, what decisions people make, what they feel and how the way they relate to each other changes.

That’s why I couldn’t say that I chose a particular story. Rather, I took a particular situation and used it to talk about the things that interest me. I’m interested in going a little beyond what seems to be happening on the surface. What do you do when an event completely changes the way you relate to what you want? What do you do when what you feel isn’t aligned with what you should do?

Situations arise that confront you with your fears, with a wound, with a past that, because you think it belongs to the past, you believe it is no longer there. And in the end, unresolved things from the past always find a crack through which to surface. And that’s how I piece things together until they start to take shape and, when you feel there is something there, it seems that you have a story.

Did you have Elena Anaya and Emma Suárez in mind when you were writing the script?

Hernández Sáenz: Elena and Emma have been part of the film from the very beginning. I will never be able to thank them enough for the wholehearted ‘yes’ they both gave me when I sent them the script. It was a vote of confidence that helped me enormously during the financing stage and gave me the strength to keep going with the film I wanted to make, and not to give up when things sometimes became difficult.

For me, casting is a little like the stage before writing the script. I’m looking to feel something that isn’t rational. I’m not satisfied with actors simply doing a good scene. It’s something more abstract. I’m not someone who imagines actresses saying the dialogue as I write it. It’s something else.

For example, I really liked Elena’s fragility, her ability to convey the broken world that the protagonist, Marta, inhabits. That was essential to me. That feeling helps me write. And Emma, an actress with an enormous presence, who I needed to give legitimacy to what I wanted to tell, helped me give certain scenes greater weight. She allowed me to go a little further.

You have a background in journalism, which seems to influence the way you shot the film.

Hernández Sáenz: My background as a journalist and documentary filmmaker probably shapes, to
some extent, what I’m interested in telling or talking about. I like to start from a place where there is truth, and by that I mean a kind of truth that we can all relate to in some way. That’s my starting point. But then I try to move away from that embryo, from that beginning, in order to think in a more cinematic way. I try to think in images. That is my challenge: how to translate into images what I initially poured into a text. I try to create a correlation between what is written and the images that begin to inhabit what is written.

Once I have that, I start writing the script, where I am forced to think in a different way. Dialogue starts to appear, which I don’t pay much attention to until a later stage. I focus on the image of each scene, the spaces, the sounds, and then the characters begin to move, to say things… This stage is very complex. A universe begins to emerge in which the story I was talking about before can unfold, and it moves away from the initial reality that inspired it. You could say that there is a way of looking at reality as a starting point, at everyday life, and then a desire to create reality through cinema.