"Men are programmed for power"

When Josefina Molina first said she wanted to make movies, there was silence all around. Now, many years later, this Córdoba-born 75-year-old, who appears much younger with a cheerfulness that's underscored by her red sneakers, has just received an honorary Goya Award from Spain's Cinema Academy.

Molina is the first female director to obtain the prize, after two actresses - Rafaela Aparicio and Imperio Argentina - and a long, long list of men. "Spain is still very sexist," she says. "Men who have been awarded this Goya include great filmmakers and actors such as (Miguel) Picazo and (Rafael) Azcona. But women, no - there has been a lack of this kind of recognition."

Molina, responsible for such films as Esquilache, the very risky Función de noche and La Lola se va a los puertos ("They are like my children") points to blatant cases of real chauvinism. "Last Monday the Forqué Awards recognized the work of Fernando Trueba and it was he who started his speech admitting that it was his wife, Cristina Huete, who ran the production company and she deserved the honor from producers more than him.

"People decide to forget women, such as Huete or Rosario Pi, a filmmaker in the 1930s who nobody mentions now. My generation, which included Pilar Miró - who at least won a Goya - and Cecilia Bartolomé, grew up professionally surrounded by men, in almost feminine invisibility."

Hence the importance she places on CIMA, the association for women working in the audiovisual industry of which she is president of honor. "Do we do lobby work? What we do is replace loneliness for solidarity, which makes our work visible. We fight for the same opportunities in terms of equality of conditions. Men have a vice: they think that women come to usurp them. Men have been programed to fight for power for centuries; we women should not repeat the same way of thinking."

So who is the most powerful woman filmmaker in Spain: a director, a TV network producer? "Few people know their names. Ay, the invisibility," she laments.

"Of course the feminine universe exists, and we want to use our vision, to make the world more rational: there exists not one, but multiple feminine points of view, because as many experiences exist as there are women. We are pigeonholed when each one of us brings a vision. The cinema of Iciar Bollain is her own, as a woman and as a human being who accumulates experiences. In general the sin of Spanish cinema is too little vision, of only seeing what's in front of it, of lacking perspective of the industry, of cinemagoers, and we women pay double for this problem."

Molina was the first Honorary Goya winner to receive her prize at the nominees party, which took place last Saturday in Madrid. "I don't know if that's good or not. It doesn't depend on me. The president did tell me that it will be summarized in a video in the big gala."

The prize-giving was one of the moments of the night. As the nominees stood posing for the group photo, they all turned round to see the video tribute to Molina. Then with the statue in hand, she quoted a line by French philosopher Montaigne, very appropriate for the current times: "Learning to live, in the end, is learning to live with imperfection in this way, and even to embrace it."