About Las novias del sur

Southern Brides is a deeply moving film that keeps with Elena López Riera’s work in the way it conveys intimacy and gives women a voice. The Spanish director explores the brides who haunt our family pictures and films, whether these wives be stern, happy, hopeful or already disillusioned. Utterly free testimonies that are edited in a way that respects their words, question marriage as an age-old ritual, and tell stories of a bygone era, that of our mothers and grandmothers. 

Elena López Riera’s interview

Two years after The Water, you once again wanted to explore women’s condition. Could you tell us how this project started? 

I started thinking about this film 20 years ago. I’ve always been fascinated by rituals, and marriage particularly. I am 20, 30, even 50 years younger than these women, but I think that between their generation - my mother’s generation - and my own, everything has changed when it comes to marriage, virginity, love, and sex. Back then, most women where I come from were virgins on their wedding day, and one picture - the wedding photo - illustrated it, and I was always obsessed by it. Southern Brides is a film that emerged on its own volition, through need, intuition, and a wish to follow my impulses. 

How did the documentary format come to you? 

I don’t really ponder what the final format will be, what genre it will be, whether documentary or fiction. My take on filmmaking has always been one of observing reality. From a production perspective, we made the film with a very small crew. Perhaps that stemmed from a desire and an urgency to film and account for what was around me. I cannot depart from my emotion, intellectual, cultural, and family upbringing that comes from mysticism, mythology, and a need for utterly primal narratives. There’s a raw quality to the film, it should not be made to look more beautiful or slicker than it is, because I think it suits the raw and earnest testimonies. 

How did you find the women you interview in the film, whose stories are so impactful? 

It’s a mix of dumb luck and encounters. My collaborator, Cristina Pérez, who was in charge of casting on The Water, is a casting director on other productions. Thanks to her, I met women who had not been cast in other films. There is also a woman who acts in The Water, one of the actress’s mother in The Water, whom I had heard speak in a podcast. And the rest was just luck. At the beginning, I thought it would be very difficult to get them to speak, but they were so keen! Noone ever asks them questions about their lives and intimacy; it’s so beautiful and so tragic to see this. That’s why I want these strong, unheard voices to be reckoned with.