Franco-Costa Rican filmmaker Valentina Maurel returns to Cannes with “Forever Your Maternal Animal,” premiering in Un Certain Regard four years after her Critics’ Week-bound debut “I Have Electric Dreams.” Set in San José and centered on a fractured family orbiting around two sisters and their emotionally elusive mother, the film further develops Maurel’s fascination with intimate tensions, contradictory female characters and the uneasy coexistence of realism and mysticism.
For Cinema Femme, Maurel spoke about writing the script in just a few months, portraying Costa Rica beyond postcard imagery, balancing motherhood and filmmaking, and why she refuses to make films merely to satisfy funding expectations. The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.
First of all, thank you for sharing your film. To begin with, when and how did you start working on the project, and what drove you to explore these intimate domestic tensions?
I started writing the film at the end of 2024, and the whole process happened very quickly. I had made a first feature about a father-daughter relationship, and I felt I had sacrificed some characters during editing. This time, I wanted to explore relationships between mothers, sisters and daughters more deeply.
I usually write through characters rather than themes. I collect scenes, dreams, fragments of conversations. Then, little by little, the film takes shape. Around that period, I had a baby myself, so naturally the film evolved into something very connected to motherhood and family tensions.
In the press notes, you mention that the title comes from a poem written by your mother. To what extent did that influence the film?
The title actually existed before the film itself. A journalist once asked me if I was working on something, and I was too embarrassed to say no, so I invented a title. It came from a line in a poem written by my mother, who is a poet.
But the mother in the film is very different from her. My mother had a happy relationship with motherhood and wrote poetry throughout her life. The character in the film emerged more from my own fears — how to reconcile filmmaking and motherhood, whether it’s even possible. So there is fiction, but also many intimate things mixed into it.
Yet you wouldn’t call the film autobiographical?
No. Not because I’m trying to protect myself — I actually write very intimate things — but because I also have to be fair to the people around me. My fictional characters are not my family members.
One of the film’s strengths is that it portrays these women without judging them. How did you maintain that balance while writing and directing?
It’s not easy. I like characters who can be terrible and wonderful at the same time. Sometimes I write a scene and, once actors perform it, I realise the character feels too exaggerated, almost like a cartoon. So I try to break my own scenes through improvisation and by letting reality intervene.
Reality is chaotic, and people contradict themselves constantly. I think if spectators experience mixed feelings toward the characters, then they won’t judge them too quickly. That’s important to me.
The cast combines non-professional performers with experienced actors. How did you approach casting?
Most of the cast are non-professionals, except for the parents. Reinaldo Amién, who plays the father, is a theatre actor and had also appeared in my first feature. The mother is played by Mexican actress Marina de Tavira, whom I deeply admired.
I wanted the mother to have a cinematic quality, somebody slightly bigger than life, almost like a woman living inside her own fiction. Marina brought that beautifully. The younger actors, meanwhile, came through casting calls. Mariangel Montero had never acted before, but she had this extraordinary presence and vulnerability.
San José is portrayed in a very specific way — not as an exotic, lush postcard version of Costa Rica. Would you say the city becomes a character in the film?
I don’t know if it’s a character [in itself], but it’s certainly a place I deeply wanted to film. Costa Rica is associated with paradise, beaches and tourism, but I grew up in San José, which many people consider ugly. I wanted to rebel against that idea.
I film San José as if it were Paris or Tokyo. For me, it’s elegant and cinematic. I wanted Costa Rican audiences to feel that I wasn’t exoticising poverty or misery, but showing a place that is real to me — the place where I discovered the world.
Could you talk about your collaboration with cinematographer Nicolás Andrés and the visual approach of the film?
Nicolás Andrés also shot my first feature. This time we wanted a different visual language. In “I Have Electric Dreams,” the camera stayed very close to the characters, influenced by the Dardenne brothers. Here we wanted more distance, more zooms, something slightly more stylised.
We even imagined the film almost like a 1970s New York movie, but set in San José. Again, it was a way of rejecting the idea that certain cinematic aesthetics belong only to certain cities.
What about your experience as a woman in film working between Costa Rica and Europe. What challenges have you faced?
Financing films is difficult everywhere, but in different ways. In Europe, I sometimes feel there’s an expectation that Latin American films should either focus on survival and social misery or offer something exotic.
In Costa Rica, meanwhile, the problem is that there simply isn’t enough infrastructure or funding. There are many filmmakers, but not enough support systems. So I exist in this in-between situation where Europe expects me to be “more Latin American”, while Costa Rica still lacks the structures needed to sustain all the films people want to make.
You wrote the script very quickly, which is increasingly rare in European auteur cinema. Do you think that helped preserve some kind of emotional purity?
Yes, absolutely. We could have waited longer for additional financing, but I knew that if I waited too much, I would eventually start changing the script to satisfy funding expectations.
One of the comments you often receive is: “It’s very nice, but what for?” I think that question can kill spontaneity. Why should cinema always justify itself by being useful?
Also, I’m a mother. I can’t spend ten years developing one film. I have to make films quickly because life moves quickly.
Finally, which women filmmakers inspire you the most?
Lucrecia Martel, definitely. For many Latin American filmmakers, she opened a door. Then Claire Denis, Catherine Breillat, Chantal Akerman and Kelly Reichardt.
What I admire in them is that they showed me films do not have to depend entirely on plot. Their cinema feels deeply feminine without being submissive or “kind”. That was very liberating for me.
