Antonia Zegers: "There is no space to talk about ambivalence in motherhood"

For the prominent Chilean actress Antonia Zegers (Santiago, 50 years old) there is an opinion that makes ambivalence regarding motherhood impossible: the woman has to happily experience a kind of "divine revelation of love" when the child is born.

There is no space to inhabit the complexities and roughness that the role entails.

For this reason, when she read the script for the film

-which opens this Thursday in Spain-, she convincedly accepted the role of Ana, a mother who faces the adversities of her bond with her seven-year-old child. years.

“I feel what is happening to her.

Not that she happens to me, but I can feel her.

I can do it.

Not only as an actress, but personally, ”she told the director Matías Bize (

,

).

Zegers, mother of two children, recognizes in the living room of her house located in the municipality of Ñuñoa, a traditional neighborhood of the Chilean capital, that she has experienced the complexities of motherhood in a "quite intimate" way.

“For me it has been a beautiful process, but one of growth.

To learn about who I am in this.

I also had a lot of fantasies that changed me the minute I experienced motherhood.

And my fantasies were idealized as is done with respect to couples”, reflects the actress nominated for Best Female Performance at the Platino Awards for Ibero-American Cinema.

The tape breaks the peach on the loneliness that mothers experience in the face of any feeling other than perfection.

“I felt that it was a very nice possibility to generate a bridge for what has no name”, says Zegers.

“Not to educate ourselves about the fact of living in darker areas of oneself with regard to a bond that has to be bright and loving.

[That feeling] is not bad or definitive, ”she adds about a debate that she has echoed in conversations after presenting the film in different countries.

Both the female and male audience agree with the need to discuss how to make a family today, how to organize and how to raise children.

Antonia Zegers during the interview.sofia yanjari

The plot starts with Ana and her husband, played by Néstor Cantillana, desperately looking for their son, lost in the leafy Quillín forest, located 900 kilometers south of Santiago de Chile.

The location is one more character, a "frightening" one, which cleverly works with the script written by the Spanish Coral Cruz.

Zegers highlights how the parable of “plant the forest in which you are going to get lost” fuels the tension that the characters go through in the

Antonia Zegers' Platinum nomination is one of the 15 that Chile has.

The actress attributes it to the good quality of the content that she is generating, a real feat for how precarious the industry is.

"When in other places they know that there is only one competitive fund and the amounts that are awarded, it sounds like crazy in relation to the flight that [films abroad] have and the image of the country that it generates," says the interpreter who started in the cinema a quarter of a century ago.

Regarding how much the industry has changed since it began, he regrets that "not much": "Cultural policies have not been up to the task of bringing Chilean cinema back to our country."

In a phenomenon of 'making a virtue of necessity', the lack of resources has driven co-productions with foreign industries, which has enriched the final product.

Antonia Zegers at her home in Santiago.sofia yanjari

In addition to film, Zegers has worked in television and theater, and even ventured into audio series with

,

Spotify fiction podcast that became the most listened to in Latin America.

For the photo session required for the interview, she excuses herself that she has makeup at the Teatro de la Memoria, where she is presenting a monologue directed by Alfredo Castro, an anchor man of contemporary Chilean theater.

In playwright Dennis Kelly's

, Zegers plays a woman seeking to exorcise great pain through humor — at least for the first hour.

And, again, the theme of motherhood appears, although from another perspective.

“We entered the world of work in a slightly more equitable way, a little more competitive, but we continue with the same burden regarding motherhood and it is a pending issue,” says Zegers about the reasons why the issue is being addressed so much. interest.

“It is not that we are not going to take care of our children, but let's talk about it.

Also at work.

I have to work to be a competitive woman and pretend that my children don't exist for those 11 hours or we understand that to the extent that they make it easier for me, the generations to come will not be horrified by being mothers”, she affirms on two aspects that require a lot of time: maternity and work.

"He is very demanding and women have been left very alone in that demand," she adds.