Nora Navas: “Cinema must stir consciences”

Three women star in three parallel stories, linked by the pain of loss and the terror of the Islamic State. It is the starting point for ‘Sinjar’, an impressive film and another sample of the dramatic talent of Nora Navas (Barcelona, ​​1975). “I have always been motivated by characters that are far away from me and that allow me to delve into worlds unknown to me,” says the actress, who was forced by this project to dive into a world that has women as its great victims. One of them, her co-star, Eman Eido, kidnapped and sold as a slave when she was 9 years old, and forced to marry a 70-year-old man. She managed to run away at 13. “I met her at the Malaga Festival and it was revealing. She was happy, but you noticed that somehow she has her soul kidnapped. If with this film we could achieve, which I doubt, raise awareness that there are still thousands of women kidnapped by ISIS living in hell…”, she wonders. And she continues: “We are quite anesthetized. We see war scenes on the news and move on to something else. I believe that fiction allows giving the same message from another place. Cinema, like art, has to stir consciences, not leave you indifferent. If not, I don’t know if it’s worth it.”

Commitment

Beyond the power and responsibility of cinema, Nora Navas is a woman committed to her profession and to her colleagues. From her position as vice president of the Academy, but also, for example, with an initiative like ActúaAyudaAlimenta, which during the pandemic raised food for culture workers without resources. “Sometimes I think that I’m getting into a lot of trouble,” she confesses with a laugh. “I chose this profession to tell interesting stories that could help change some views of human beings. I guess that leads me to contribute my grain of sand, which is always very small, to certain causes, which mobilize me much more than making movies or walking on red carpets”. If we focus on his work at the Academy, he is clear: “Although you always have the feeling that you could have done more, and there have been times when I wondered what I was doing there, I think that Mariano Barroso’s mandate has been very productive” . They don’t seem to have bored each other: they are about to shoot the series ‘Los Farad’ together, for Amazon.

From mother of…

Winner of two Goyas, for the recent ‘Libertad’ and for ‘Pa negre’ (2011), she has just rejected “a beautiful script, because she was a character very similar to the one in ‘Libertad’, and I will end up being the mother of Catalonia. I always make the same joke: I play the trumpet, give me a role as a trumpet player already! Or a heroin addict. My best professional career was when I was 30-something, with very powerful characters, and now many come as mother of… But the beautiful thing is that on stage I can do anything. I prefer to earn much less money doing theater, if the character makes me be at my best in each performance, than making movies for the sake of making them. In the audiovisual, everything depends on the algorithms”. Speaking of series and algorithms, Navas confesses that he has a most exciting project on his hands. “Everything arose in full confinement, in a Zoom with my actress friends Clara Segura, Marta Marco and Cristina Genebat. I thought: ‘these girls are the shit, incredible actresses, in a brutal moment in life’… and, fed up with teenage series, I decided to write one for ourselves. Soon we will start moving it, it will be called ‘Constelaciones’, and it is a story of women who serve as mirrors for each other”.

To compete

For now, in November he will premiere Cesc Gay’s ‘Stories to not tell’, where he shares with Maribel Verdú and Alexandra Jiménez a hilarious story about three actresses, supposedly very close friends, who coincide in a casting in which stabs fly. Is it also based on real events? Navas laughs: “Of course that competition exists. But on filming I am the nerd who doesn’t know anything, no matter how many chickens there have been. It is that all those moves do not go with you when you are in this profession to tell something worthwhile, and not to shine or to be told how beautiful you are and how well you do it.