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Director's Statement
The film begins with a photo session. Janis (Penélope Cruz) is a photographer and she is doing a portrait of Arturo Buendía (Israel Elejalde), a forensic anthropologist. Arturo becomes Janis’ lover. Without intending to, Janis gets pregnant, but Arturo is married. Janis frees him of all responsibility, she will take care of the baby. Janis faces her future maternity on her own. She always wanted to be a mother and she isn’t willing to let the opportunity slip by. Her grandmother was her only family and Janis feels the need to be a mother, to create a family. In the hospital where she is going to give birth, she coincides with Ana (Milena Smit), a teenager scared and traumatized by her imminent maternity. They will both be single mothers and they both got pregnant by accident. When Janis tells her that she doesn’t regret it, Ana confesses to her that she does. Janis is the vocational mother and Ana is the accidental mother. Ana's mother, Teresa (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) shows up at the hospital. She is the imperfect mother, lacking in maternal instinct, who didn’t hesitate in handing Ana over to her father when they separated. In her way, Ana has felt more of an orphan than Janis always did. Both give birth at the same time to two girls who hours later are in observation because of unimportant issues. Meanwhile, exhausted, the new mothers talk in Janis’ room. The experience has changed Ana radically, the little time she had with her new-born child has erased any fear or uncertainty she felt before the birth. All these elements belong to the melodrama genre, but I decided that PARALLEL MOTHERS would be a tense, restrained drama, difficult to act, and with a protagonist who perhaps is not a model of behavior but who attracted me precisely for that.