Catalan actor Aina Clotet wins Rising Star Award at Cannes Critics' Week

Catalan actor Aina Clotet has won the Rising Star Award at Cannes Critics' Week for her performance in Viva, the film that also marks her feature directorial debut. The film is one of seven Catalan works screened at the 79th edition of the prestigious French festival.

Shot in Catalan, the tragicomedy explores themes including fear of death, dependence on romantic love and the will to live. The film competed in Critics' Week, one of the Cannes Film Festival's parallel sections.

Viva follows Nora, a woman in her forties trying to rebuild her life after recovering from breast cancer.

Her plans begin to unravel when she meets Max, a man in his early twenties who disrupts her fragile stability.

In a recent interview with the Catalan News Agency (ACN) in Cannes, Clotet described her first experience behind the camera as "an act of absolute resilience" that emerged "from a very intimate and profound place."

She said that from the outset she knew she wanted Viva to speak "about love, passion, romantic love and the fear of being alone and the fear of dying, which is the deepest of all."

"These two opposing forces give Nora a fierce desire to live that throws her into a very intense kind of carpe diem," she explained.

What she had not initially planned, however, was to star in the film herself. Clotet said she began writing the project at the age of 35 and unconsciously imagined the characters at that age.

Five years later, when casting the lead role, she realised it was "more interesting" for Nora to be older, creating greater distance between her and the male protagonist.

"The film is fiction, but obviously I share many things with Nora and I saw that, deep down, she carried my voice," she said.

Clotet said she never doubted that she wanted to shoot the film in Catalan, the language in which she thinks, feels and expresses herself.

"I also love linguistic mixing, because life – like the film – has that too. English, Spanish and French are spoken in it, but I felt that Catalan had to be the main language, without question."

The film, which will be released in cinemas on June 19, stars Naby Dakhli, Marc Soler, Lloll Bertran and Zaira Pérez, with special appearances by Guillermo Toledo and Josh Zuckerman.