Macedonian Teona Strugar Mitevska releases in Spain God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunya, a story sharing an actual fact occurred in 2014 that starts in her hometown in the Balkans where an orthodox priest throws a cross to the river. The man who will pick it up will have good luck all year. But this time, the person who firstly found it was a woman, Petrunya.
The author relates an incredible premise, although inspired by a real-life incident, about rebellion and the ability of resistance against tradition. “When I found out how the news was treated by media, I got really disappointed because it stayed in the anecdote, when actually its meaning was huge”, mentioned the author during her encounter with the press in the 16th edition of the Seville Festival.
Then, Strugar felt the need to tell what had been forgotten. She has explained that “in the Balkans it exists a very sexist and traditional culture”. In the film and in reality, “the cross is tradition, the story, a very heavy remora”, something that “it must not disappear to understand where we come from, but that it is necessary to be able to create a fairer world”.
The Balkan director, who has reminded us that this is the first Macedonian film released in Spain in 27 years, has also suffered her position in society as a women, overall in the beginnings: “Things have started to change in the last five years, but when I started 17 years ago, I felt like an extraterrestrial in the filming, I wasted more energy showing my masculine side to feel accepted than doing my own job”. She added: “Although I had to fight a lot for my right to direct and for the fact of designating myself a director”.
Transferred to the screen, Petrunya has the leading role in this fight, interpreted by the actress Zorica Nusheva, who has especially worked in theatre, she has made a debut in the film industry with this film: “It was my intuition that told me ‘it is her’. It connected with Petrunya’s character and I wanted to show different kinds of beauty”. Moreover, the film implied a work of over eight months based only on rehearsals with Nusheva to get Petrunya transmit the major honesty of her story. “Thanks to her education, Petrunya is the winner since she reached to get out of the jail society has built and where the other characters got locked”, has declared the filmmaker.
For Strugar Mitevska the most important message of the film is the one concerning the values of freedom. “It is something very important to define yourself. It is somehow one of the keys of this story”.
Strugar Mitevska competed with this feature film for the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, where she won the German Film Guild and the Ecumenical Jury prizes. In addition, she has pointed out as the producer such acclaimed feature films The Wild Pear Tree, by Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Sierranevada, by Cristi Puiu.
