Close-Up: Pilar Palomero

Bozar presents one of the most influential voices in contemporary Spanish cinema: Pilar Palomero, whose work questions the processes of intimate transformation that leave a before and an after in a person’s life.

In Palomero’s cinema, the big events almost never make a sound: they happen inside the characters, through intimate decisions and new gestures that are discreet but revealing and draw the line between what they have been and what they are becoming. Her films show the invisible passages in which identity is redefined: childhood cracking open and giving way to adolescence; the sudden leap into adulthood; the tension between what is not yet fully gone and what is coming too quickly.

Pilar Palomero accurately captures a vital, historic and symbolic rite of passage. Schoolgirls depicts a Spain torn between the weight of Catholicism and the vertigo of modernity in the 1990s. Motherhood deals with an unwanted teenage pregnancy that forces a young woman to take on responsibilities before she is ready — a conflict that also resonates in the adult world. Los destellos is a real epic of everyday life, where a small action, a conversation, a treatment or a silence can change the course of a family’s history. Interludes without a map, blind intimate crossings.

Rather than observing, Palomero’s camera listens: it captures emotional states in the making, the awakening of an awareness of what it means to commit, to respond and to grow. In her cinema, it’s not the anecdote that counts, but the ethical depth: what do you do when responsibilities arise for which you are not prepared? How do you deal with what can’t be avoided? For Palomero, virtue is not moral; it’s an emotional lucidity born of the experience of shared fragility.

Trained in cinematography, she brings sensory precision to every shot. As a scriptwriter, she is constantly refining her narrative language. Her first film, Schoolgirls, was a revelation at the Goya 2021, where she won Best Film, Best Debut Director and Best Original Screenplay. Without ever repeating herself, she explored new areas of risk with Motherhood, and in Los destellos achieves a formal and emotional purity that confirms her as an auteur with full expressive maturity.