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S H O R TS Y N O P S I SAnabel abandoned her daughter Chiara when she was barely eight years old. Thirty-five years later Chiara returns with a strange request for her mother; she asks to spend ten days together. Anabel sees this trip as a chance to get her daughter back, but she doesn’t know that Chiara has a hidden purpose and she’ll have to face the

most important decision of her life.

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Anabel, driven by her husband’s career as a diplomat, dedicates her life to philanthropy. Her commitment to altruistically helping others has made her popular, making her a reference in raising donations for humanitarian organizations among her exclusive circle.

L O N GS Y N O P S I S

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It’s during one of these charity banquets that she finds herself faced with her past when she recognizes one of the waitresses working for the catering service. It’s her daughter Chiara, who she abandoned when she was eight years old and hadn’t seen again in thirty-five years. It’s no coincidence, Chiara had found her.Mother and daughter embark on a journey into the past, alone, confronted with the difficult task of recovering thirty-five years in only ten days. Or that’s what Anabel thinks. Because Chiara has a hidden purpose.

And when Anabel discovers the real reason she has to face the most difficult decision on her life, a decision that will change her forever.

SUNDAY’S ILLNESS is a drama loaded with intrigue, where what people say has nothing to do with what they really mean and in which the past and present coexist in the hidden corners of a dense forest.

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C A S T&

C R E W

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C R E WWRITTEN ANDDIRECTED BY

DIRECTOROF PHOTOGRAPHY

PRODUCTIONDESIGN

COSTUME DESIGN

ORIGINAL MUSIC

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR

EDITING

Ramón Salazar

Ricardo de Gracia

Sylvia Steinbrecht

Clara Bilbao

Nico Casal

Víctor Cuadrado

Teresa Font

SOUND DESIGN

MAKE UP DESIGN

HAIR DESIGN

CASTING

PRODUCTION MANAGER

EXECUTIVEPRODUCER

PRODUCER

Álvaro López-Arregui andNicolás De Poulpiquet

Ainhoa Eskisabel

Sergio Pérez

Ana Saínz-Trápaga andPatricia Álvarez de MirandaIñaki Juaristi

Rafael López Manzanara

Francisco Ramos

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CHIARA //

ANABEL //

GRETA //

Bárbara Lennie

Susi Sánchez

Greta Fernández

BERNABÉ //

MATHIEU //

Miguel Ángel Solá

Richard Bohringer

With the special collaboration of:

C A S T

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D I R E C T O R ’ SN O T E S

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R A M Ó N S A L A Z A R

N O T E S

The first stone I placed to build this story was deciding that SUSI SÁNCHEZ would be the main character, the point of view from which the film would be narrated. We’d clicked together perfectly working on my previous film 10.000 NOCHES EN NINGUNA PARTE, a film that earned her a Goya nomination.

THE BEGINNING

Susi is an actress who will do anything to reach the most hidden emotional and sinister corners a character can have. Her commitment to a project is absolute and painstaking and I’ve rarely seen someone willing to go so far or defend the woman she’s playing with tooth and nail. I wanted to work (more and better) with her, there’s no greater pleasure than being able to penetrate even deeper inside an actress knowing that she’s going to take the leap without a safety net.

Working with her has been exceptional since, even during the writing process, she was already a part of the project. Being able to read what you write in the mouth of the actress who will play the role, to listen to how her soul expresses the character, to have an immediate response from an actress about the creative process; is like a rehearsal that starts two years before filming, an extremely valuable weapon that is not always available at this stage in the process.

D I R E C T O R ’ S

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I wanted to stay away from the choral, to tell a story focused on two female characters, mother and daughter, and I wanted the dramatic weight to be between them. Therefore the narrative anchors had to be precise: mother and daughter; an abandonment; a reencounter; a motive; a redemption?

I always look for references in photography, I think it’s an art that carries important imaginative weight in its interpretation. A single photograph can tell a whole story. I chose two for this project, two that served as the headlines to inspire the rest of the story.

In the first (from Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s family album), we see a little girl’s profile looking at something out of the shot, giving importance to what we don’t see.

In the second (by photographer Jaime Olías), a woman almost completely submerged in a lake, motionless, in a choppy shot that highlights the importance of the water.

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And my obsession with joining these two images emotionally is the trajectory faced by this film: starting with an eight-year-old girl waiting for her mother to come home (which she never does) and ending up thirty-five years later with her mother submerged up to her shoulders in a lake.

What happens between these two images is SUNDAY’S ILLNESS.

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I remember when I was eight years old I deeply hated the feeling I got on Sunday afternoons. That moment when the sun goes down and all you can do is let everything be over and wait until Monday arrives. It was incredibly distressing for me, I was invaded by unease and a deep feeling that life didn’t mean anything anymore.

It all went away on Monday, of course. You’d face Monday with strength and hoping that Friday would arrive as soon as possible.

A memory from chi ldhood

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I thought, what would happen if one of the characters had that Sunday afternoon feeling her entire life? What if that eight-year-old girl was still there, waiting at the window for her mother to get home that Sunday

afternoon, but she’s over forty years old now? And that’s how Chiara, my second main character, came to be, the character played by BÁRBARA LENNIE.

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This film’s premise is the following: a mother abandons her eight-year-old daughter, and her daughter reappears thirty-five years later and asks her mother to spend ten days with her.

Therefore the next step in creating the story would be: how do you squeeze thirty-five years into ten days?The narrative structure presented itself like a kind of funnel, in which the universal themes to be covered after nearly four decades of absence would get stuck in the narrow pipe of the ten days.

THE FUNNEL THEORYBesides not wanting to make a film with characters explaining themselves or making excuses for what they did wrong, it seemed restrictive to try to solve the abyss opened by abandonment and absence in only ten days. So there’s a decision not to take that road and let the characters go to the essence of their souls without expressing their emotions openly; bypassing reason in favor of contained emotion that is covered by the impossibility to understand that which marked them for the rest of their lives. There are things too big to be expressed; or like one of the characters would say: “I can’t explain it to you, you have to experience it.”

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All of the creative decisions in this film were made based on “nothing that the characters say is what they really mean.”

A gap in both of their lives develops their inability to express what they feel. So the silences speak, the listener expresses more than the speaker, and their difficulty to understand each other is intensified.

And that’s where the element of INTRIGUE enters the film. Why do they have to spend these ten days together? Is it for revenge, reconciliation? The impossibility of reaching a clear understanding of what’s happening takes the characters, especially the mother, to the limit of reason to the point that she feels her life is in danger. What if her daughter wants to kill her?

WHAT GOES UNSAID

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It was time to shoot the scene she nailed in the casting test. Over a year ago, I told the casting directors that the actresses could call me to ask about the character. BÁRBARA LENNIE didn’t call. She seemed too young for the character to me. But she walked in and, without saying much in the middle, grabbed a tennis ball I gave her for the scene (it’s actually a cup of hot tea). It’s by far the most difficult scene in the film. She started talking, looking out a window that wasn’t there (which the electrical crew had blown out

the other day) and said —loaded with hate, disgust and measure— the words I had written one year before. She ripped through them, like the hurricane on Friday. When I tried to talk to her after she picked up her backpack like she was embarrassed and walked out. I was left speechless, with that feeling of anguish you get when you see something you’ve written now has a voice and body, like when you see the guy you like show up at the nightclub and you act like you didn’t see him and don’t care, but your heart is racing and you’re

about to pee in your pants.What I like the most about working with an actress I haven’t worked with before is observing her in secret (without her seeing me) and trying to understand how she works in the creative process; what emotional movements she executes before going into character. With Bárbara I was unable to. I tried to hide in corners, behind columns, etc… to study her without being seen. Anywhere I hid, no matter how good a spot, in five seconds she would turn her head right towards me.

THE SEARCH FOR INTIMACY

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She’d look at me calmly like she’s saying “gotcha” and give me a knowing smile. Except one time that she must of seen me so focused on deciphering her that she opened her eyes incredulously like she was saying “get out of there, you damn Nosferatu” and I turned my neck like an owl.

Before filming she said: “Let’s have lunch one day, okay? And talk.” And it was there, seated on the terrace of a cool restaurant in Barcelona, our quinoa salads in front of us, that she gave me the most intense third degree that anyone has ever given me about a character. While she was asking me all the right questions (and by that I mean all the questions that later played a role in creating her

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character, not the ones that get tossed away) I noticed one thing: a gesture I’ve seen her repeat which I think hides her secret.

Her head was tilted at an angle while she was asking me. But when I answered and gave her the information the angle changed. She looked slightly to her right and forty-five degrees down while she nodded to herself. There must be a door down there somewhere that helps her select, process and meticulously organize the information about the soul of her characters.

When we’re filming and I go over between takes to whisper something into her ear so no one else will hear, I notice her lower her head as if to listen to me, but it’s actually to send the new information through her secret door. She whispers “okay” then five seconds later “okay” again. And a few minutes later, in the next take, you see it. You see it all. Absolutely everything.

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Who am I? Can we bury the past? Can we survive being abandoned? Are we capable of forgiving completely? Does a mother ever stop being a mother? Does a daughter? Can we live a lifetime in ten days? How far are we willing to go to redeem guilt?

SOME QUESTIONS PRESENTEDBY THE FILM

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B I O F I L M O G R A F Í AD E L

D I R E C T O RD I R E C T O R ’ S

F I L M O G R A P H Y

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R A M Ó N S A L A Z A RD I R E C T O RRamón Salazar (Málaga, 1973) is a Spanish film director. He studied at the School of Dramatic Art in Málaga, specializing in acting to later study filmmaking in Madrid.

2017

2017

2013

2005

2005

1999

LA ENFERMEDAD DEL DOMINGO

EL DOMINGO. PRÓLOGO // Short film

10.000 NOCHES EN NINGUNA PARTE

20 CENTÍMETROS

PIEDRAS

HONGOS // Short film

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B Y R A M Ó N S A L A Z A R

S C R E E N -P L A Y S

2017

2017

2016

2013

2012

2010

2005

2002

2002

2002

1999

LA ENFERMEDAD DEL DOMINGO

EL DOMINGO. PRÓLOGO

TINI: EL GRAN CAMBIO DE VIOLETTA

10.000 NOCHES EN NINGUNA PARTE

TENGO GANAS DE TI

TRES METROS SOBRE EL CIELO

20 CENTÍMETROS

AMNESIA

PIEDRAS

TAXIDERMIA // Short Documental

HONGOS // Short film

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C O N T A C T

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E L L A S C O M U N I C A C I Ó N

P R E S S

DEBORAH PALOMO deborah@ellascomunicacion.com0034 639 635 510

ELIO SEGUÍelio@ellascomunicacion.com0034 636 608 541

P R O D U C T I O N

ZETA CINEMACalle Orduña, 32nd floor 28034 Madrid. Spain.infocine@zetaaudiovisual.es

C O M PA N Y

I N T E R N AT I O N A LR I G H T S