SAN SEBASTIAN — Javier Bardem, at San Sebastián to pick up his 2023 Donostia Award for career achievement, announced he will star in “El Ser Querido,” the next film from Rodrigo Sorogoyen. The director’s “The Beasts” won a best foreign film Cesar Award in 2023, beating out four Cannes Festival winners.
Bardem will play opposite Vicky Luengo, star of Sorogoyen’s hugely popular TV series “Riot Police” in a story written by Sorogoyen and his longtime co-scribe Isabel Peña, which Bardem described at a Donostia Award press conference as a “father-daughter drama” who re-meet after many years.”
According to the film’s synopsis, “El Ser Querido” turns on an acclaimed film director and his daughter, an unsuccessful actress, who shoot a film together after years of estrangement and a difficult past that none of them want to talk about.
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“El Ser Querido” is one from a first slate of six auteur event features announced by top Spanish pay TV-SVOD operator Movistar Plus+, whose backing will ensure that this is one of the highest-profile Spanish movies shooting in 2025. It will shoot from January on the Canary Island of Fuerteventura. Sorogoyen was last seen at the Venice Film Festival where he presented his latest series, “The New Years.”
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Film’s co-producers are Caballo Films, El Ser Querido AIE, and France’s Le Pacte (France), financed by ICAA with the support of the Creative Europe Media Program. A Contracorriente Films will distribute in Spain. Movistar Plus+ has first TV window rights. Goodfellas handles international sales.
Dressed with casual elegance – a gray jacket, white t-shirt – Bardem began Friday’s Donostia Award press conference in fine fettle, cracking jokes with journalists, some of whom he had known since he first came to San Sebastián in 1994 for Imanol Uribe’s “Los Días Contados.”
He became more sombre, however, when asked if he had ever regretted about speaking out about human rights issues. People couldn’t apply self-censorship on these issues, he argued, going on immediately to lambast Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for its Gaza attacks as “totally inadmissible, terrible and dehumanizing.”
Israel’s leadership, under its most radical government which was “not representative” of the Jewish community, was committing “crimes against humanity and international law,” Bardem asserted, adding that the devastating attacks by Hamas on Oct, 7 could not justify the collective punishment of Palestinians.
Bardem urged global powers, particularly the U.S. and the U.K., to reconsider their “unconditional support” for Israel and called for the International Criminal Court to hold those responsible accountable.
Given such circumstances, he was “impacted” by the Donostia Award, but found it difficult to be in a celebratory mood, Bardem confessed.
Has he changed as an actor over the 30 years since 1994?
Yes, Bardem answered. When he set out, he was more of a method actor. “Before, if my character broke his fingers. it was like, on “Extasis,” for example, ‘I’ll break my fingers.’ Now, he studies “how to enter a character and, above all, how to exit it.” “When you work from imagination, from fiction, from creativity, work is much more powerful and can go further than adding nothing more than yours, believing that yours is sufficiently interesting and powerful to satisfy the public. And it is not usually. It is usually yours.”
That attitude towards acting spilled over to advice he gave on the set of “Monster. “My young colleagues from the series ‘Monster,’ who are 21 or 23 years old, are extraordinarily good in the series. But when I got to shoot, I saw that they were suffering the unspeakable. Of course, there’s all the weight of the series, which talks about abuse, physical, emotional abuse, and maybe sexual abuse. They carry it over their shoulders, it is their first important role, so they put everything in it.
“But I remember sitting down with them and saying, ‘Guys, we are going to live together for three months, the four of us, you, my wife [played by Chloë Sevigny] and me. I think it is essential and fundamental that we remember that we have families who trust us, who protect us, who are here when we call them, who support us, who understand us and who do not fuck us. And from there we can enter the action. Because if not, you will not be able to stand it for six months. And I believe, in my opinion, that your work will not do better.”
Otherwise, “there will come a time when you enter both your trauma, that you get stuck and you will not be able to see the trauma of the character you are going to play.”
What has not changed is his sense of family. He belongs to one of Spain’s greatest filmmaking dynasties. The parents of his mother, actress and activist Pilar Bardem, were Rafael Bardem and Matilde Muñoz Sampedro, two of the most-admired actors working in Spain from the 1940s to 1960s. Uncle Juan Antonio Bardem was one of the most important Spanish directors who dared to criticise the society dictator Francisco Franco had created. Brother Carlos Bardem is a three-time Spanish Academy nominee.
What they share is a large sense of humor, and political principle.
“My brother always tells an anecdote. Our mother was separated at a time when Spain did not permit divorce. She brought up three children, was an actress – regarded at that time as little better than a prostitute – and worked all hours to be able to give us pork chops and pasta with tomato. But when people knocked on the door collecting funds for the rights of Sahari women, she’d give half of what we had.”
“We’re taught by action which represents us as human beings,” Bardem said.
Having dedicated his 2008 Best Supporting Actor Oscar to his mother, Bardem told the San Sebastián press conference that he still saw himself as “the son of Pilar.” “And I hope to die being the son of Pilar and nothing more than the son of Pilar,” he added.
