Alauda Ruiz de Azúa, director of ‘Los Domingos’: “When a girl becomes a nun, parents have the feeling that a daughter is being stolen from them”

This movie is a Rorschach test. In the protagonist’s decision – still at school, surrounded by classmates who are beginning to prepare for the Selectivity exam – each viewer will be revealed what they already have inside: Ainara, 17 years old, wants to be a cloistered nun.

Before turning 20, Alauda Ruiz of Azúaborn in Baracaldo, Vizcaya, witnessed a similar conversion. An acquaintance gave up parties and university, love affairs and trips, mornings surfing and afternoons watching the sunset. He entered a religious order. After the success of five little wolvesfor which he won the Goya for best new director, the producers were interested in his box. He had, in fact, a story in store. The conflict that the disappearance of their daughters in the name of faith generates in believing families had spent almost two decades pinned in their curiosity. Last September, Sundayshis script outline already made into a film, achieved the Golden Shell of the San Sebastián Festival.

What preconceptions did you have before researching the script?

I understood the convent as a decision and then I understood that they did not experience it as a personal choice, but as a calling. The nuance is important. You meet girls who feel very powerful things and I don’t know if the translation of that is divinity, but the feeling is real. I also believed that the vocation had a lot to do with compassion and help, but they talked about love: they lived it as a loving relationship, an infatuation that made them want to be with Jesus. That was his happiness. It is a perfect love: it fills everything. It is something different from human love, which has many more bumps and many fewer certainties. I am 47 years old and have a little more perspective on life. You already know that you may not fall in love just once, that relationships evolve and that at that age what you feel is very powerful. But I understand that at that moment, it takes them away on an emotional level and they understand it as God’s call.

Some congregations, in fact, try to ensure that income occurs before the age of 30. That also interests you: the role of adults in the formation of the faith of children.

I wanted to build from that tension: you can believe that this really is a call from a divine being, something supernatural, but If you are not a believer, there is also the hypothesis that in some way it is pushed by the adult worldwith its shortcomings, the mourning for a deceased mother and the religious training of the school. It is also true that not all Catholic school girls become nuns. It is not so clear what is involved there to make a young person in 2025 feel that their place is a cloistered convent.

Are vital decisions explained by the wounds that pass through us?

I don’t know if in all of them, but my intuition would be that in many there is a search for a refuge, for some type of certainty or security. She has lost her mother and has a complicated relationship with her father. At 17 years old, I also felt very powerful things that I don’t know if I translated correctly. In many cases it seems plausible to me that consolation is sought. The opposite is uncertainty around affections. The other is a love forever. A nun once told me that she felt that Jesus loved her despite everything ugly that might be in her.. It made me kind of sad. What’s going to be ugly in you? But feeling that that love will always be there is very powerful. It is a decision that also provokes a lot of external judgment. I think they don’t communicate it because they will feel very judged except in the community in which they want to integrate. I think that, from the nuns I have spoken to, they needed to tell each other. They are complex processes that live in solitude. That is why the adults who are part of their lives have a lot of power. Therefore, responsibility. It is possible that it is a process that the person needs to live in privacy, but it also places the person who provides spiritual direction in a place of great control over a sometimes very young person.

It also happens with the relationship between religion, adults and children: faith is not transmitted by infused science. You have to teach it.

But you could pass it on in your family. We transmit a lot to minors at home with our behaviors and silences. There is also an interest in it happening from a very young age on the part of the Church and parents. I understand it, but it can lead to moral and psychological abuse.

As in all hierarchical relationships. What have you discovered about yourself with the film?

That it is very difficult to be tolerant in a genuine way. Some of us like to think we are, but it is difficult to practice religiously for people with secular education.

It’s more superficial.

Yes. Since you normally practice it socially, it is comfortable. When a decision is made in your home that is so foreign to your beliefs, it becomes complicated. Even in believing families it was a shock and conflict.

Perhaps that life in faith lasts until the daughters remain in the social sphere. When they withdraw from the world and stop being productive, it falters.

And I think there has also sometimes been the feeling that a daughter was being stolen from them.

And guilt?

Sure. Especially when not understanding why their daughters report with the decision already made. How had they not noticed? That generates a lot of pain. And sometimes the way, surely wrong, to try to convince her not to take that step is to confront it and reject it, which is even worse for the emotional bond between the girl and the family, where real ruptures occur. When it is someone young, it makes it difficult for us adults because it seems that they are taking a path that for us is wrong. It’s hard to accept that it could be the place where she is happy, even though in theory we love them. It is a happiness that we do not understand.

You repeat in your cinema: the family is the elemental cell of society, but you show that it can also be a prison.

Until now it has been very difficult to break with the family because of the weight it has as an institution and because we grow up with the story that the family will love us, that it is the last great refuge, that it is the place of the truest affections, that it will always protect you. Until now It has been very difficult to break with the family because of the weight it has as an institution and because we grow up with the story that the family will love us, that it is the last great refuge, that it is the place of the truest affections, that it will always protect you. We do not consider the possibility that this is not the case or that we can consider that sometimes it may be healthier to break the bond instead of staying and trying to sustain something that ends up being more of a representation. Your family is told to you in one way and when you grow up you realize that, for example, your father is not the one you have been told about. There are things that are not said, but that matter. An important emotional learning takes place when the family is not validated at any cost. There is something very tribal about maintaining it. The alternative is uncertainty. The loneliness.

Unlike his aunt, the father ends up being the most tolerant of the characters. He does not reproach his daughter’s decision.

Many times when you want to understand something it seems like you are legitimizing it. At what point have we been afraid to understand someone or something that you don’t like, but that is their reality? It’s more honest to build. Although to what extent do we make decisions freely? But also It may be a little arrogant or intolerant to believe that the other does not have the autonomy to choose.. You, yes, but the other is not living his will to its full potential.

To those who seem weak they end up being condescending. This type of paternalism is often criticized on the left.

Or moral superiority, right? Yes. The definition of freedom seems to constantly slip away, we are unable to admit that someone has been free. It works in both directions: for or against the vocation, nuns and aunts cast themselves in absolute truth. I find it interesting how moral superiority dynamites the bridges with the other and the possibility of being reasonable disappears.

They try to get him to go to university so he can be exposed to another reality. There was controversy recently because María Pombo said that you don’t get better by reading more. Do we overvalue the power of culture?

I think they thought more about the university parties. It seems to me that culture is not infallible, but it can make us capable of understanding other lives and situations that make us uncomfortable. That is a place of growth. In chaos there can be sufferingbut there is also happiness in exposing yourself to other things.

But do we still do it?

Less and less, with these bubbles that we have formed. But I am interested in not being complacent with the viewer. I try to treat him the way I like to be treated: I don’t like them to be paternalistic or to congratulate me for my beliefs. I want to be treated like an adult and questioned.

Does disappearing in the name of God have anything political?

Every act is political and this is a renunciation of a way of living. It consists of a break with the family and with real citizen life. It is a departure from the established system.

And the basis that currently creates status is left aside: productivity.

But they don’t feel that way. They do not create something material, but with those prayers they feel that they are doing something valuable for others. Chatting with one I told her “well, for all that praying, look how the world is”. He replied: “Oh, but if we didn’t do it it would be much worse!” If you don’t believe, of course…

You are an atheist, right?

Yes, but I have always really liked trying to understand. And after the movie I think I have gained a certain tolerance. I’m not saying I’m a pure soul. I have my rolls, like everyone else. But When you get close to something you realize that on the other side there is a person looking for comfort.. I try to understand it from humanism.

What do you put your faith in?

In my son. In my family. In the cinema. In telling stories.

Realization: Beatriz Valdivia

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