“Have you been on this series?” “Are you anorexic?” “What are you doing here when you’ve won so much money?” In a scene from Selftape, the autobiographical series which premiered on Filmin this week and was co-written and starred by sisters Joana and Mireia Vilapuig, a teenager pokes fun at Joana for setting up a drama workshop in her high school years after she it was the most famous girl in Catalonia. Everyone knows that Joana starred in Polseres vermelles, the TV3 fiction about a group of boys who are hospitalized for a variety of reasons, from self-image and body image disorders (TCA) to leukaemia. An unprecedented phenomenon between 2011 and 2013 and not only on Catalan territory. Its episodes garnered three million viewers on the jump to Antena 3 as Red Bracelets, even moving Steven Spielberg, who bought the rights for its US-market adaptation to found Red Band Society (2015), a version of the ABC network Oscar-winner Octavia Spencer in her cast.
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This awkward sequence in this educational center, like much of what happens in the six 30-minute episodes directed by Bàrbara Farré and produced by Filmax with the Filmin Original label, happened exactly as it was in reality. Because Selftape explores just that. What remains after two miracle sisters from Sabadell have become so famous that they can’t take the subway with their parents without getting overwhelmed. What happens when a decade later, that temper and interest is gone and they find themselves competing for a role. And most importantly, what happens when you feel like you “stole your sister’s dream of being an actress” [Joana]’ and suddenly the directors (men) prefer you (Mireia).
Mireia and Joana Vilapuig in a promotional image for Selftape. Maria Jou Sol
Fiction and Videotapes
With a narrative that mixes reality and fiction, including real clips from his media archive or the family VHS of his childhood, Selftape – that’s the name of the remote casting self-recording that allows directors to make an initial selection without having to make one having to organize personally—, part of a real anecdote that happened to these sisters in 2015, who are now 28 years old (Joana) and 25 years old (Mireia). “We saw ourselves taping each other for the same role after a long drought after the Polseres boom. We joked that we already had material for a series with it, but we didn’t take it seriously until 2019,” explains Joana, who is sitting next to her sister in the Filmin offices in the upper district of Barcelona after an intensive day of the Promotion and a few days after the presentation of the series at the Malaga festival.
Mixing her home archive with her television interviews at the height of her fame, these sisters began to tell their story: “We were very impressed with putting this puzzle together. It was the first time we saw the transition from childhood bliss to a socialite. Going through all those horrible interviews where we just wanted to run away and where we always had a face of ‘What the hell are you asking me?’ to go straight to the editing of the selftape of ‘Hi, I don’t have a job and I’m selling my bike ‘to a camera’ here made us understand that it’s very strong material for a series,” concludes Mireia together. His story indeed gave up for one.
Sisters Joana and Mireia Vilapuig on March 27th at the Filmin offices in Barcelona. Albert Garcia
sisters and rivals
Joana knew she would be an actress as long as she can remember, but she had to witness how her little sister, who didn’t care about the artistic world, triumphed in a casting she attended with almost a thousand other Catalan girls. It was Mireia who, at the age of ten, took on the role of Christ in Herois (Heroes), Albert Espinosa’s Pau Freixas film, which pays homage to The Goonies and Count on Me and tells the friendship of a group of children in a summer that would shape his life.
Mireia (left) and Joana with the rest of the stars of “Polseres vermelles” in an archive photo.
From this amazing casting where Mireia was the only girl in the group came the cast of boys who would do Polseres vermelles with the same directing and scripting team. Only this time Mireia was too small for the role of Cristina. Joana, well, would be the chosen one. She would also have to suffer from Smurfette syndrome: she was the only girl in this group of children who triumphed in full hormonal explosion and entered puberty. Joana became famous (Mireia would come to take part in the series) and fate meant that this promise of success did not apply to either of them, apart from taking part in series and films such as Cuéntame or Palmeras en la nieve.
This latent rivalry, this constant comparison and confrontation in a mirror deformed by family ties is the emotional engine of the series. One that, without complacency, reveals a relationship bitterness (very plausible) between the sisters. “Mireia has what Joana doesn’t have, and Joana has what Mireia doesn’t have. They both have to move away to see each other again and understand that they work like ying and yang,” Joana clarifies. And Mireia adds that her sister wasn’t acting when she tells her in one episode, “I realized I wasn’t happy by your side.” I was already prepared for this accusation. “When we recorded we already knew what we were going to do. Before we started shooting, we did a very emotional job. We talk a lot about our relationship to understand each other, to know what we’re provoking and to be able to interpret it realistically and sincerely,” the two say, with an innate ability to finish each other’s sentences.
Mireia and Joana, during the shooting of “Selftape”. Maria Jou Sol
The Wound of Abuse
Although part of the family plot is based on fiction—”everything related to our parents and circle of friends isn’t real, we had to protect them in this brutal display of our privacy,” says Joana—selftape is a delicate and intelligent evidence in the form of a self-portrait of the ravages of an audiovisual culture in which actresses are exploited even if they are minors, alluding to the myth of a creative genius to legitimize the abuse.
Mireia and Joana Vilapuig in a moment from ‘Selftape’. filmin
No one gets off scot-free on the show: casting directors asking you if you’ve had an abortion and what you’ve learned from it, even though that experience has nothing to do with the role you’ll be playing. Directors who require you to strip naked during rehearsals and perform fake erotica that doesn’t add anything to the narrative, or who kick you out the day before shooting for not being “sensual enough” or “confident enough”. Go ahead with your career and expect one of the sex scenes you shot in a movie to be endlessly uploaded to porn platforms as if it were a sex tape.
Wounds complemented by off-world abuses such as B. Stealthing (the removal of condoms in a non-consensual manner during sex). “To some extent, all women have experienced this type of situation. As actresses, we suffered a lot from the male gaze. Many times we have felt very much like puppets and very vulnerable in front of these creators who only want to vampire your pain and wounds. We wanted to show how hostile it can all be,” says Joana. Mireia supports her: “It’s a different world now thanks to the intimacy coordinators, but we filmed for a long time and adopted a kind of formula for sex scenes where we were unprotected,” she explains.
The clips interviewing the girls are so uncomfortable to review that even one of the screenwriters who took part in Selftape, Ivan Mercadé, who was the producer of Polseres Vermelles, went so far as to reveal how himself when presenting the project developed the film in front of the media archive about the treatment of those who were babies: “I felt guilty.”
Mireia and Joana Vilapuig during the shooting of Selftape. The series is set in Barcelona and combines Catalan and Spanish.Maria Jou Sol
The prison of the “girl series”
Inspired by creative women like Michaela Coel with I could destroy you (HBO) or Siri Seljeseth with Young & Promising (available at Filmin) and with a “very intimate and European” aesthetic, the Vilapuigs regret that their series suffers from this prophecy that despite calculations and completely opposite meaning, he includes them in “the same drawer” as series like Cardo or Autodefensa.
“We’re three completely different shows, why isn’t anyone comparing us to Nacho, who also starts from the experiences of an actor?” wonders Mireia. “It bothers me a lot living in this box full of women like there could only be one show. It’s like Young & Promising sold as Norwegian Girls. But when everything is girl, nothing is girl,” she says.
After these six episodes, set in Barcelona and Olso and featuring Catalan, Spanish and English, the two sisters are still unemployed. Mireia just made a selftape without much hope. “Sometimes I take it as, ‘Come on, throw it away and do it'”. Joana doesn’t rule out a new series of episodes: “The same in a decade, with the 40s. We’ll definitely have a sea of interesting self-tapes again.”
“It was clear to us that we wanted to surround ourselves with women in the project,” say the sisters. Bàrbara Farré, director of “Selftape”, together with Joana Vilapuig, in a moment of shooting.Maria Jou Sol
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