“It was a dream come true to be able to shoot my first movie and it’s a very personal story,” said Paz Vega of her feature directorial debut Rita, which she shot earlier this year.
The coming-of-age drama, which is set in 1984, follows 7-year-old Rita and her 5-year-old brother Lolo from a working class family as the whole country goes crazy over the European soccer championships with Spain in the quarter-finals.
“It’s just two kids trying to understand what is happening in their house and what is happening in their lives, which is not easy stuff,” she said.
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Vega, who is a jury member for the Red Sea Film Festival this year, told Deadline’s Red Sea Studio that working with two young children as her leads was not as challenging as she would have expected.
“They did an amazing job,” she said. “We’d been working with them for three months before [the shoot] and they did amazing performances and I’m just so excited.”
Rita is produced by Marta Velasco and Gonzalo Bendala at Aralan Films in association with Oda Films and the participation and Andalusian public broadcaster Canal Sur Radio Y Television.
Vega, who has starred in a number of projects such as Sex and Lucia, Netflix series Kaleidoscope and Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk To Her, touched on how happy she was that Spanish-language content is being embraced by international communities and also gave her thoughts on her experience being in Saudi Arabia this year.
Check out the video above.