portrait of precariousness and anger, by Desirée de Fez

There is something very complicated in what they do Alvaro Gago (director and screenwriter) and Maria Vazquez (actress) in ‘Matria’: giving overwhelming vitality to a female character, Ramona, who has so many things against her that she should have run out of strength a long time ago. From different places, both draw a complex, frantic and contradictory human portrait of the protagonist, a woman who works (at the beginning of the film) in a canning factory on the Galician coast and at the same time faces precariousness, the lack of affection from your partner and the feeling that you are not doing well as a mother. But, far from showing how these open fronts defeat it or exploring the heroism of resistance, the director and actress compose a character who does not conform, who complains, who fights, who looks for alternatives and, importantly, who is angry because he has reasons.

María Vázquez is immense in That woman’s skin is always on the verge of exploding, whose anger, because she is human, sometimes contradicts the decisions she makes and who only lowers her guard when a stranger offers her a blanket to cover herself (when, for the first time in a long time, someone takes care of her and not the other way around). . She is the absolute heart of a film that is also very interesting because of how she raises the issue of second chances, questions the feeling of debt to the places we belong to, and demystifies and humanizes the figure of mother courage.