With her film “Sundays”, Alauda Ruiz de Azua explores the religious vocation in adolescence

Sundays is your third feature film. Why were you interested in the religious vocation?

This subject has interested me since the beginning of my studies at university. I was around twenty years old then and I was told the story of a young girl my age who had made the decision to become a cloistered nun. His sudden renunciation of university, of travel, of new friendships has always questioned me. After making my feature film on the arrival of a child in the daily life of a couple (Cinco lobitos 2022), I decided to make a film on the impact of a religious vocation within a family.

How did you prepare the film?

As for Query (miniseries broadcast on Arte in 2024), I documented myself a lot. I collected testimonies from women with varied backgrounds: some had become nuns, others had started a process of discernment and then stopped it. My meetings with psychologists and parents were also very valuable. All the characters in the film are inspired by the trajectories of these real people. From one story to another, recurring patterns emerged. For example, I was able to realize that the maturation of a vocation sometimes gives rise to family conflicts, even within practicing households. When the vocation appears, some parents suspect indoctrination. Others feel a sense of loss of their child. What interested me above all was to depict the family mechanisms that take place at the time of such an announcement.

The great tension in the film is between Ainara, who has faith, and her aunt Maite, an atheist…

Their very strong emotional relationship transforms from the moment Ainara announces that she is in spiritual discernment. Little by little, it is as if a wall rises between the two characters whose points of view are antagonistic. Maite reacts very badly to the announcement of the vocation of her niece, whom she finds too young to cloister herself. For this atheist woman, faith is a fiction, even madness. Whereas, for Ainara, it is, on the contrary, an intensely real experience that gives meaning to her existence. Around these two figures, Uncle Pablo tries humor to maintain the link, while the father and grandmother seem to remain confident.

What have you learned by exploring this topic?

This allowed me to overcome my own prejudices, because I am an atheist and I have always taken a critical look at the institutional side of the Church. By making this film, I understood that, in the intimacy of faith, certain believers experience consolation and comfort. The film questions the role of the human environment (family, education, personality) in the vocational process, without ever questioning the sincerity of the feeling experienced by future nuns, a very intimate feeling, of great complexity.

Several sequences show young people discussing religion, love, sex and family among themselves. who is it who distinguishes this generation’s quest for meaning?

We all need to believe in something to get us moving, even more so as we enter adulthood. Adolescence is the time when our emotions arise in powerful ways, often for the first time. I don’t believe that young people today practice more than those of yesterday. However, I clearly perceive a difference between the current generation and mine, in the relationship to the spiritual. For my generation, religion was strongly tinged with politics, because of the role that the Catholic Church played during Francoism. For us, Catholicism was inseparable from dictatorship, from a very specific model of society. Born three years after Franco’s death (November 20, 1975, editor’s note), I grew up with this story, which is not the case for young people today. When Ainara announces her approach to her friends, they have no problem. They show more tolerance towards the Catholic religion, because they no longer automatically associate spirituality and ideology.

How did young audiences react to your film?

They rated it very well on the platforms and came to see it in theaters. While the adult public has entered more into the religious debate, young people have become interested in the theme of intra-family relations. Feeling listened to in your own family and affirming your personal choices: the path traveled by Ainara spoke to them.

After its release last October, the film remained at the top of the Spanish box office for several days.

He is nominated 13 times for the Goyas – the equivalent of the Césars – and has won various awards. How do you explain this success?

We approached the subject of religious vocation with honesty and respect for convictions, without taking sides. The film has generated a wide variety of readings within society and deep debates among believers and atheists alike, generating more questions than answers. Without knowing it in advance, we may have touched on a taboo subject in Spain: our country is secular and modern, but through this kind of work we realize that we are not as secular as we believe… (Smile.) Imbued with a religious heritage, Spain is also very marked by its complex relationships with the Church. Questioning this story through a film is part of the repair.

Was psychological abuse in the Church a subject of reflection during your writing?

My subject is the birth of a vocation. I am absolutely not dealing with the issue of abuse. However, I open certain avenues on possible worrying deviations for loved ones during religious discernment: the youth of certain postulants, their discreet – sometimes secret – links with reference figures such as a teacher, a spiritual guide, a priest. In the testimonies I collected, some families told me they learned very late of the presence of a conscience director accompanying their minor child. It is up to the spectator to observe, to reflect and, for believers, if they wish, to enter into this interesting debate to be led in the Church and in our society.

You have chosen to locate Sundays in the Basque Country.

Is there a particular reason?

It was natural for me to place my film in Basque culture, the codes of which I know. I grew up in the town of Baracaldo, near Bilbao, where I received a secular education. My family was rather progressive, without taboos, imbued with literary and artistic culture.

Why is family central in each of your films?

Understanding how it works fascinates me. The family is a living organism, in constant transformation. In Spain it is a very strong social institution. We often go to great lengths to maintain family unity around rituals, such as meals or major holidays. The one from my film meets every Sunday. It appears very solid, but will turn out to be fragile. It is in these moments of vulnerability that the family seems most interesting to me to observe and decipher.

Before going to film school, you studied English philology. Have these studies had an impact on your way of practicing the seventh art?

Yes. By immersing myself in the analysis of texts, I learned to understand the complexity of each subject and to handle the concepts. Because, in philology (study of a language and its literature through writing, editor’s note), a diversity of themes, characters, points of view, forms and contents intersect. In all my films, I invite spectators to share my questions. What matters to me is to take them on a journey to the heart of the emotions and feelings of my characters, without judgment. I wanted to understand how faith works and animates a human being. For me, Ainara remains an enigma, because in faith there enters a part of the irrational which can never be completely grasped.