she plays a woman who, at almost 80 years old, claims the ability to decide, sensuality and desire in the film Malaga Streetby Moroccan filmmaker Maryam Touzani, which this Friday opens the 29th edition of the Malaga Spanish Film Festival. Maura was “very clear” that she wanted to participate in this project when she read the script, which “excited” her, and she had no problem with the two warnings that the director gave her: that her character is in all the sequences and that she had to appear naked.
“It is true that it is quite exhausting to be in all the sequences, and at 80 years old many things have changed, but fifteen or twenty ago I don’t know if I would have said yes or no,” the actress stated at a press conference. At her age, she receives the roles that “appropriate” her, and Maura does not believe that in the future she will continue to “work so hard”, since she also wants to “rest”. “I will do things based on a script that excites me, because I am no longer interested in just working with important people, and if I can I will also make a short film with a newbie,” says the actress, bluntly when asked how she handles her age: “Age, I handle it well because there are no more balls.”
“Even if you are 80 years old, you have to do what you want and not be influenced by what is around you,” said the interpreter. “In the papers they give you, normally you are going to go to the sanatorium or die.” “Right now I feel freer than in my entire life, and I don’t have any steps to climb or any people to meet,” he said.
Maura plays María Ángeles, a 79-year-old Spanish woman who lives alone in Tangier and her life takes a turn when her daughter (Marta Etura) arrives from Madrid to tell her that she has decided to sell the apartment where she has always lived. The protagonist will be forced to do everything possible to keep her home on a journey in which she rediscovers—against all odds—love and desire.
The director of Malaga Street, Maryam Touzani has revealed that this script “was born from pain and absence”, because she began writing it when she lost her mother, and that led her to memories of her, her grandmother and her hometown, Tangier, where that street that gives its name to the film is still located. This double Moroccan and Spanish culture that appears in the film was experienced by Touzani since her childhood, and she claims it as “a wealth” in today’s world: “My grandmother went to Morocco when she was seven years old, because one thing does not prevent the other. On that Málaga street there was a mix of cultures and religions that still coexist today with tolerance and love, and it is something very beautiful in a world like today’s, in which we are erecting walls and separations,” said the filmmaker.
