THE ACTRESS IS AWARDED ONLINE DURING A TALK WITH THE UPPER ARAGONESE FILMMAKER AFTER WHOM THE PRIZE IS NAMED
BOTH TALENTS DISCUSS ACTING, HER RELATION WITH DIRECTORS ON THE SET OR THE PROCESS OF PREPARING CHARACTERS
The Carlos Saura City of Huesca Award of the 48th Huesca International Film Festival goes to the actress Anna Castillo, a prize that means great support, a demonstration that ‘I am still trusted and so is my career’. The online award is framed within the meeting with one of the most prominent names of the Spanish cinematography, the Upper Aragonese filmmaker after whom the prize is named. Anna Castillo and Carlos Saura are two talents -one emerging and the other one renowned- that share experiences and reflections in a talk moderated by the writer and filmmaker Luis Alegre.
The discussion mainly dealt with the relationship between actors and filmmakers on the set. ‘If a director has chosen you on account of some reason, he is to trust you, to reassure you’, stressed Castillo after listening to Saura himself defending the figure of players when facing the difficulty of the first shooting days, ‘if you have made the right choice, you have to let actors fulfil themselves’. The prize winner also declared to be passionate about her profession, a work that gives her the chance to ‘feel, to go though many experiences, to live many lives’; however, she always keeps her feet on the ground and if at any time ‘it stops making me as happy as I am now or I have new concerns, I hope I will change the path of my life, though it will always have to do with art’.
When working, Castillo claims to study characters thoroughly at a psychological level so as to come to understand them; on the other side, she manages to separate perfectly her work from her daily life. A day-to-day reality attached to cooking or her great interest for acting coach. A series of revelations culminated by one of the most important moments of her career, it happened during the shooting of Holy Camp! A project she was attached to for five years, between the theatre play and the feature film; ‘I felt fulfilled, that the effort was worth the while’, she concludes.
A STUNNING CAREER
Anna Castillo (Barcelona, 1993) got involved in acting as a child; at the early age of 12 she enrolled the music group sp3 and when she was 15 years old, she signed up for one of the reference shows for children at Televisió de Catalunya: Club Super3.
Her first opportunity on the big screen came thanks to Elena Trapé with the feature film Blog. This same year, she debuted with the musical A by Nacho Cano and joined the cast of Antena 3’s series Doctor Mateo. Ghost Graduation by Javier Ruiz Caldera became her second film, this work was followed in 2013 by Antena 3’s series Amar es para siempre. She combined her role in TV fiction with the musical Holy Camp! until 2014.
Her professional breakthrough came in 2015, Icíar Bollaín’s The Olive Tree (2015) made her win a Goya Award for Best New Actress and, in addition, she participated in outstanding series such as El Ministerio del Tiempo, Paquita Salas or Estoy vivo. Gold by Agustín Díaz Yanes and the film adaptation of the work Holy Camp! were her following projects, thanks to the last one she was nominated to the Goya Awards for Best Supporting Actress.
In recent years, she has succeeded with Journey to a Mother’s Room, Celia Rico’s first work, Movistar + series, Madrid on Fire, Adú by Salvador Calvo and Mariano Barroso’s series for Movistar +: La línea invisible. We will see her soon on the big screen with La vida era eso by David Martín de los Santos.
LINK TO INTERVIEW TRAILER HERE
