Director Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s “El Cer Querido”, which will have its world premiere in competition at Cannes on May 16th, begins in an upscale restaurant in Madrid. This scene lasts 20 minutes.
In the film, world-renowned film director Esteban Martinez (Javier Bardem) reunites with his estranged daughter (Victoria Luengo) and offers her a role in his next film, even though they haven’t seen each other in 13 years.
To make this scene ingrained, Sorogoyen shot it on the first day of filming. He also asked Bardem and Luengo not to meet or speak, let alone rehearse, before filming.
“They had to act out a 10-page script, but they had to talk (or remain silent) for an hour and a half for this encounter to last,” Sorogoyen said.
“The result is a 20-minute scene that, in my opinion, is pure gold. The silence, the doubt, the facial expressions are the most realistic I’ve ever shot,” he added.
“The main word I kept repeating to myself while directing ‘The Beloved’ was definitely ‘experiment,'” Sorogoyen explains. To illustrate this, while speaking at his production company Caballo in Madrid a few days before the Cannes Film Festival, he got up from his seat and started sketching on a whiteboard.
He explains that the film’s prologue was shot digitally. When Emilia finally accepts Esteban’s offer, the film-within-a-movie begins filming on the arid Canary Islands of Fuerteventura, an alternative to Western Sahara in 1932.
As the conflict between Emilia and Esteban escalates on set, Sorogoyen begins mixing digital film, 35mm, 16mm, 8mm, widescreen and box formats, color and black and white. It culminates in a kaleidoscopic style, with Esteban directing one scene erupting in anger and returning to the verbal and physical violence that Emilia clearly knew and suffered from as a child, Sorogoyen explains.
“If this had been my first film, I wouldn’t have taken so many risks,” Sorogoyen recalls. But as things stand, the director knows that this can happen thanks to the full confidence of producers Movistar Plus+ and France’s Le Pacte and the budget they have given him.
Experimentally, Sorogoyen enjoyed a full-on collaboration with Javier Bardem. “He’s very intelligent, he’s down to earth, he’s the smallest star in the world, and he wanted to try on things. If I did seven takes of the same shot, he’d give me seven different performances,” Sorogoyen enthuses.
The trust that Movistar Plus+ and Le Pacte had in Sorogoyen was hard won. From 2025 to 2026, other than France, no other country in the world, including the United States, will have as many films submitted to Cannes competition by their own directors as Spain. And no Spanish director has been as successful on the international stage, particularly in France, as Sorogoyen, who won the 2023 César Award for Best Foreign Film for “The Beast,” ahead of four films that won the competition prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
Sorogoyen and his longtime writing partner Isabel Peña have worried about men over their 13-year career. Their conflict negotiations (The Beast), their soaring ambitions (The Realm), their otherworldly violence (God Save Us), and the romance they have with them (2014 debut, Stockholm).
“It’s very important that Esteban Martínez is a father and a director. We made that clear from the beginning,” Sorogoyen says.
Still, Sorogoyen argues that calling The Beloved a film about toxic patriarchy misses the point in some ways.
Sorogoyen and Peña didn’t set out to make a film about the subject. They discover what the film is about while writing the script or even on set or in editing, he explains. Sorogoyen added that “The Beloved” was the most freely written and directed of his films and encouraged innovation in his actors.
Plus, there’s a reason for the authentic arsenal of cinematic effects he uses.
The different styles reflect different points of view, the emotions of the characters, and in the case of black and white, they represent moments of introspection as Esteban and Emilia recall their past.
“As directors and actors, Esteban and Emilia are storytellers,” says Sorogoyen. Narrowing its focus, The Beloved is “a story about storytelling, and the storytelling that we relate to as a society and to ourselves as individuals.”
“So I asked myself: How do you shoot a movie about storytelling? The most logical thing to do is to shoot it in as many different ways as possible,” Sorogoyen says.
According to Sorogoyen, Esteban and Emilia begin by arguing in a restaurant about what really happened when they went to see 2004’s “Kill Bill 2.” According to Emilia, Esteban was drunk and high and began rowing loudly with other spectators.
“The film is a quest to establish a common narrative about their current relationship and the pain Esteban has caused in the past,” Sorogoyen teases.
Victoria Luengo and Javier Bardem in “The Beloved”
Victoria Luengo and Javier Bardem in Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beloved. Courtesy of Movistar Plus+
