EL SER QUERIDO
Spain, France
2025 | 135 min. | Fiction

The acclaimed film director Esteban Martínez is a legend both for his films and for his past marked by violence and excess. For his new project, he offers his daughter Emilia a role under the pretext of helping her with her stalled acting career. Living together on set will foster a closeness they haven't shared for years, but it will also reopen old wounds that never healed.

Directed by: Rodrigo Sorogoyen
Written by: Isabel Peña, Rodrigo Sorogoyen
Produced by: Eduardo Villanueva, Nacho Lavilla, Guillermo Farré, Jean Labadie, Alice Labadie
Cinematography: Álex De Pablo
Editing: Alberto Del Campo
Production Design: José Tirado
Costume Design: Saioa Lara
Make-Up & Hair: Irene Pedrosa, Jesús Gil
Original Score: Olivier Arson
Sound: Fabiola Ordoyo, Aitor Berenguer, Yasmina P. Ramirez
Visual Effects: Ana Rubio, Juanma Nogales
Casting: Arantza Vélez, Paula Cámara
Cast: Javier Bardem (Esteban Martínez), Victoria Luengo (Emilia Vera), Marina Foïs (Marina), Raúl Arévalo (César), Raúl Prieto (Raúl), Melina Matthews (Bárbara), Mourad Ouani (Bilal)

Statement of the director:
The main word I repeated to myself while directing THE BELOVED was unequivocally "experiment". I wanted to go further, explore unfamiliar territory, and try things we hadn’t tried before. From the script stage, we made a conscious decision to break away from the rules of the drama genre. The result was a strange and beautiful text about a father and his daughter, two seemingly ordinary people with family conflicts, existing in the world of cinema. That terrain was already unstable enough for me, or rather volatile, to continue down the path of experimentation.
In my mind, it was the best way to proceed. We had these characters involved in the filming of a movie. They are dedicated to telling a story. They light a set, put make-up on actors, and dress them in costumes to build the story of soldiers in 1931 inside a fort in colonial Sahara. Just as they tell a story, our main characters, Esteban Martínez and Emilia, also tell their stories. The story of a dark past full of excesses and the story of abandonment. We all do it: we constantly tell stories to explain ourselves to the world and to ourselves.
I became obsessed with the idea of how to tell the story of people who tell stories on so many levels. I knew I needed to break away from my previous work. THE BEASTS (2022) had a classic language; I wanted THE BELOVED to be the total and radical antonym of that. I decided to shoot in every possible format. We shot in black and white, in color, in photochemical (65 mm, 35 mm, 16 mm, 8 mm); we filmed digitally and in Mini DV format. We alternated between different lenses throughout the shoot, allowing the film to contain multiple cinematic textures and perspectives. I approached each sequence as its own self-contained story. From the start of the casting process, I tried to find performers who would go along with what I proposed, so that we could learn and surprise ourselves with what we do. I tried to take improvising as far as possible. We invented situations and scenes that weren’t in the script. Dialogues that came up in previous rehearsals or on the day of shooting itself. The number of great actors who helped tell this story pushed me to try to play with all of them. To give each one their space and to be able to work with them to get the most out of them, so that they felt part of this story. We always played with the intention of taking our story further, of reaching the highest possible levels of performance, in order to find that truth that is always so sought after in a film, mixing the acting talent we had with the playfulness and surprise that allowed the performers to believe they were in a real situation.
In this sense, there is a scene that perfectly illustrates this desire: a meeting in a restaurant between our two main characters. Father and daughter have arranged to meet for lunch so that he can offer her a role in his next film. For ten pages of the script, they talk about their present and their past, bringing to the surface the wounds of their condition. In the script, of course, it was a very tense scene, dominated by the feeling of two people who haven’t seen each other for thirteen years and who have a history full of wounds. How do you help actors achieve that feeling of real nervousness when you are going to see an important person in your life whom you haven’t seen for years and with whom you have a complicated relationship? It is simple: by making sure they haven’t actually seen each other before.
We took the riskiest path I have ever taken. I agreed with Javier Bardem and Victoria Luengo that we would shoot that scene on the first day of filming. I agreed with them that until that day, until the moment we said ‘action,’ they would not see each other, they would not rehearse, they would not talk to each other about their characters. I rehearsed with each of them separately. But not only that. I wanted that feeling to be as real as possible. Therefore, I suggested we shoot it all in one take, which was a very long take in which they could recreate a real hour-and-a-half meal in a restaurant, without any visible technical equipment. In addition to the ten pages of script they had to perform, they had to talk (or remain silent) for the hour and a half that the encounter would last. Both actors took the plunge as soon as I suggested it, showing a determination and enthusiasm that I will be grateful for – and admire – for the rest of my life.
Unsurprisingly, Javier and Victoria were extremely nervous on the day of filming, but so would their characters, Martinez and Emilia, have been. The result is twenty minutes of scenes that, in my opinion, are pure gold. The silences, the doubts, the looks are the most real I have ever filmed. Looking back, I can only feel satisfaction and gratitude. Satisfaction in having followed the path we set out at the beginning. That radical experimentation, that feeling of constantly putting ourselves to the test to tell this story in the way I imagined, without complexes. A very complicated, very intuitive way that sometimes seemed to make no sense, but in which I always believed. And grateful because I could not have done this alone. The technical and artistic team and my producing partners trusted me and gave their all to tell this story about The Story. A story about the making of a film. About the story of a director and an actress. About the stories of a daughter and a father. About, ultimately, all of us.

Production:
Caballo Films, Movistar Plus, El Ser Querido AIE, Le Pacte
https://www.caballofilms.com

World Sales:
Goodfellas
https://goodfellas.film/