The Punishment, Matías Bize’s seventh film, continues its international festival journey.

On Friday, March 17, he competes in the Official Section at the Malaga Film Festival (Spain), after a grand appearance at the Miami Film Festival, while he begins to prepare for new premieres at the Fribourg Film Festival (International Competition: Feature Films) , Cartagena Film Festival (Ficciones de alla) and the Chicago Film Festival, certainly a list that is thriving.

Likewise, an award which started with his first Festival, in Tallinn (A class Festival Category) winning Best Actress for Antonia Zegers, followed the Best Chilean Film of 2022 of the Circle of Art Critics of Chile.

The great success of this production has just achieved the nomination for Best Female Performer for the Platino Awards and is also about to be released in cinemas throughout Spain on March 31.

To know why this “punishment” engages through a “mirror effect” we invited the director and lead actress to do a face-to-face conversation. Don’t miss this exclusive interview!

Why did you want to make this movie?

Matias Bize : This is a film that came out with the help of Coral Cruz, a Spanish writer with whom I had worked before. She had been a consultant for my films from The Life of the Fish onwards and we really wanted her to write a script for a film of mine.

And it happened that I proposed the story to her about a couple who loses a child in the forest. And again, I intended that we do it in sequence, as in my first film,  Saturday, 20 years ago.  It took a long time to find a story that could be shot in sequence and have a better outcome as a movie. From there on we began to explore themes of repentant mothers, and we read a lot.

 “For me it was a very important issue that had to be put on the table, a taboo topic, necessary to think of ourselves as a family, as a couple, as a society, as ourselves”

Antonia Zegers : There are many reasons why I wanted to make this film, for starters I have always loved collaborating with Matías Bize.

In fact I worked on Saturday his first film that was shot in sequence and twenty years later Matias was inviting me to do another sequence shot movie and that was a very attractive idea for me, but when I read that script I said to Matias I feel that woman, I know what’s wrong with her.

Working with Matias for me is always very fascinating because it is a collaborative work, because we rehearse a lot and it is a space of creation and freedom. And that was accomplished in this process that was quite long because of the Pandemic or thanks to it, it made us go deeper and deeper in the construction of the characters and the script.

Why Antonia Zegers as the lead?

Matias Bize : I needed a tremendous actress because I knew that finally the responsibility was going to fall on her and also on the entire cast and as I had worked with Antonia in several films we already knew each other a lot, so I always thought about her. It was my first choice.

The film required an actress who could have subtlety, details, and on the other hand, she could overflow with emotion, and I felt that Antonia could accomplish that. On the other hand, I also needed actors who came from the theater, the film being a sequence shot is quite similar to the work in theater. We had many readings and we put a lot of our themes into the dialogue. It was an amazing process not only with the cast but with the whole team that was behind the scenes as well.

How was it working with Matías Bize?

Antonia Zegers : Matías is a person who loves theater and likes many acting processes and I know this since I was in his first film when he was just leaving Film School.

During rehearsals in addition to being a creative space, one can contribute, change, propose. Instead, the filming space is sort of fixed, and there it transforms into an ultra focused person who needs to portray what happened in the rehearsals. Matías is a very obsessive person, very focused and very talented. Qualities that I admire very much in a director.

 What did it take to make a film shot in real time? 

Matias Bize : Making a film shot in sequence is difficult because you can not make mistakes, but at the same time it has a great benefit and is done in a continuous way to get to the emotions that the film has, to that exciting end.

“It was necessary that the protagonists went through the entire journey of the film with the full arc of their characters. I felt that this film or this story was going to be better told this way, and it had a lot of repairs. It was the right way, to achieve those performances and that dramatic level”

Antonia Zegers : It requires a lot of rehearsal, not just acting work, but the whole team.  Because we are all involved in each other’s work.

That small veil that exists in those who act or look at those who are acting here is broken, and we are involved in the work of both. It’s like learning a dance between inside fiction and the outside. And in this case it was also in a forest, which is also a character of the film.

“There were many difficulties for the technical team,  more like challenges and I feel that they were achieved very well thanks to everything we rehearsed”

What was the biggest challenge of this film?

Matias Bize : The biggest challenge was to achieve the emotion that I wanted to convey, the intensity of this journey, that it was real, not an imposed emotion but that came from within the characters. Everything had to be true: the search for the child, the walks, the fact that it was getting dark, and just like that the emotion they had to feel was an exercise in extreme realism

Antonia Zegers : For me the biggest challenge is that once action was said there was no turning back, that was very dizzying and required a very large degree of concentration… and getting to this woman’s soul wasn’t easy.