Grace Querejeta

Gracia Querejeta was born in Madrid on August 13, 1962. Cinema runs in the family, her father is the famous producer Elías Querejeta . However, Gracia received academic training in another subject, Ancient History, at the Complutense University of Madrid. She and she also has dance studies. Although she had tried cinema before, not only as a spectator, since as a teenager she had a role as an actress in Las palabras de Max (1978), by Emilio Martínez Lázaro , and there are even voices that assure her childish presence inThe secret intentions (1969), by Antonio Eceiza . But it didn’t seem like acting was his thing, and instead he learned a bit of everything in his father’s company, for example as an assistant director to Carlos Saura inSweet hours (1981). Already as a director, she caught her attention with her short De ella Tres en la marca (1988), which would be integrated into the television series 7 footprints . In the documentary genre, she will sign El viaje del agua , along with Jesús Ruiz and Nacho Pérez de la Paz , which won the Goya in 1990 in its category. She will not abandon this field, collaborating for example in the soccer series El partido del siglo (1997).

This being the case, the times seemed ripe for debuting in fiction feature films. she did it withA way station (1992), an intimate drama whose script was signed by the director and her father, and which earned her a Special Jury Prize at the Seminci in Valladolid. The film had a particularly successful evocative quality, you could tell that there was a sensitive filmmaker behind it.

For this reason, there were high expectationsRobert Rylands’ Last Voyage (1996), a co-production with the United Kingdom shot in English, based on prestigious literary material, the novel by Javier Marías “Todas las almas”. There would be controversy over the song, because the writer took the Querejetas to court, asking that his name be removed from the film, it was not recognized in a film that was too free a version of his work. In various instances, the judges agreed with Marías, but this did not mean that Gracia again showed the soul of an artist in her approach to a homosexual university professor from Oxford.

A sensitive look at the feminine soul is revealed inWhen you come back to my side (1999), which had a script by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón . The meeting of three sisters on the occasion of the death of their mother serves to dive into the secrets of the past, suspicions and bitterness buried somewhere in memory and that emerge without remedy. The film would achieve a special mention at the San Sebastián Film Festival.

Attentive to politics, Gracia Querejeta would sign in 2004 the segment Where do we live? of the collective filmThere is reason! that attacked the government of the then Spanish president José María Aznar. That same year had more interest in what is surely the director’s best film,Héctor , who co-written with David Planell follows the vicissitudes of a teenager who has lost his mother and goes to live with an aunt; the announcement of a visit from a father who has never been interested in him arouses conflicting feelings. Once again the director’s constants are present, family conflicts associated with secrets due to actions that embarrass.

And, of course, inSeven tables of French billiards (2007) Gracia Querejeta returns to the charge with a script co-written again with Planell, where there is also a death, and a business, billiards, which serves as a metaphor for life and interpersonal relationships as multi-band plays . Of course the female characters stand out, not in vain the interpretations of Blanca Portillo , Maribel Verdú and Amparo Baró won awards, the first in San Sebastián, the others in the Goya. In addition, the script was also awarded in Donosti.

On television, Gracia has made inroads assuming the direction of episodes of the Cuéntame series , and is preparing a television miniseries about Rocío Jurado .

That the Querejeta film saga continues seems to be confirmed by the participation of fifteen-year-old Ian, son of Gracia, at the Orson the Kid film school for children and young people. Of course, the boy has absorbed the atmosphere of the sets, as a child he accompanied Gracia on the set of Héctor. Does history repeat itself?