"Acting makes me very happy, saves me and heals me"

Malaga (Spain), March 24 (EFE).- “Acting makes me very happy, saves me and heals me.” This is how she sums up her passion for her job, the Argentine actress Mercedes Morán, who receives recognition this Thursday for her entire career with the Retrospective Award of the Spanish Malaga Film Festival.

On the occasion of this award, Morán takes a tour of her life and recalls how she married when she was only 17 years old and became a mother when she was 19, fundamentally moved “by an enormous hunger for independence”.

“I got married very young and in love, but what moved me was the hunger to take charge of my life, at a time when women, at least in my family, which was very conservative, couldn’t even talk about going to live alone.”

At that time he believed that his vocation was Sociology, but curiously he has to thank the Argentine military for pushing him into acting.

“I had studied for two years, the coup d’état took place and they emptied the career of content. Now I can talk about it, but at the time it was very traumatic for me, because the future I longed for disintegrated, but it was not the worst thing that happened in the country in those years.

He believes that what unites Sociology and interpretation is “a rather obsessive observation of everyday human behavior”.

“The best show is to sit on the sidewalk, watch people go by and imagine behind each one what their life will be like according to their behavior. I am fascinated by how people behave when they do not know how to look. The look on us modifies us , not always for the better, and when we are not aware that we are being looked at, something very genuine appears”.

From her beginnings, when she was “a very shy girl”, she remembers that her first teacher showed her “that acting was not about being very outgoing”.

Among his interpretations, he considers that there is “a before and after” of working with Lucrecia Martel, because he considers her “an artist, and when working with an artist there is a kind of whirlpool that is generated around him and that transports you”.

For Morán, “complete dedication and trust with the director is necessary, because there is no other way to work in the cinema, unlike the theater, where although the role of the director is also very important, the function every night is of the actors. , while the films belong to the directors”.

He confesses his predilection for working with new directors, because it is “very nourishing to be in those experiences that are unrepeatable and there is something that happens only the first time”, for which he establishes with those filmmakers without ties “without hierarchies of any kind” and likes “to see how they are growing”.

He also reveals that he feels “a special infatuation” with Latin American cinema, “because there is a very pure talent, and it is a small industry that comes out to compete with the big industry as equals”, despite the fact that they are some films that Unfortunately, viewers “do not have as much access due to its distribution in theaters”.

She considers that, since in recent years there have been “more female directors, who tell of their dreams and their needs”, now the type of characters offered to actresses “moves from the prototype”, as there is also a need “for stories of women more real and less in male fantasy”.

About her television work, she admits that at the time of her first training as an actress “prestige was lost on television and acquired in the theater”, so she was “very afraid” of working in that medium and resisted doing so because of a “prejudice”.

But later he worked on “Gasoleros”, a “very successful” program that brought him “to the most massive popularity” and with which he began “to break prejudice and the fear of superfame”.

Mercedes Morán is shown as a woman committed to causes such as the demand for legal, safe and free abortion in Argentina.

“I had to live a lot of lack of freedom in my early youth, and when my country returned to democracy I thought that the best way to preserve freedom was to practice it. I do it out of personal need, sometimes disobeying some advice from the industry, which He tells you better than not. It’s a desire to be myself. To be others I already have the characters, but in my personal life I don’t enjoy managing what I feel.”

By Jose Luis Picon