How much can happen in public toilets? Of all. confessions and confusion. Absurd situations, scenes of terror, accusations, sex, gossip, envy… In the short film Tula, the author and director Beatriz de Silva (Cáceres, 25 years old) transforms the toilets of a high school into a sanctuary, “that safe place where most of us “People undress like no other place,” explains the young filmmaker.
The short film, released in February 2022, deals with complicity, sisterhood and sexual education and has already received 18 national and international awards. In September it won Best Foreign Language Short Film at the Lady Filmmakers Film Festival in Los Angeles and qualified for an Oscar.
And all because, in less than 13 minutes, De Silva breaks down, in comedic tone, the risk that lack of sexual information poses to adolescents’ physical and mental health. Tula is a cleaning lady at a girls’ school. In the middle of a job, a student – the principal’s daughter – enters the bathroom and admits that she is pregnant. The short film is a dialogue between mirrors, sinks and toilets.
“In the end I was confused too. In Badajoz, in a girls-only opus center, sex was demonized, and when I was in high school at a co-ed institute in Vitoria, they told me it was all worth it,” comments the filmmaker.
In order to improve emotional and sexual learning, Beatriz de Silva is involved in theater workshops in schools: “They help to grow personally, to name emotions, to understand oneself and to understand others. And sex is that, communication, the better you understand yourself, the better you will understand the other person and the better it will work.”
The daughter of a screenwriter and producer has loved cinema since childhood. “In Badajoz, they didn’t let me watch TV every day, but on the weekends I could see all the films I wanted.” From there he went into compulsive reading and then to writing. “I’ve been doing this since I was 11 years old. I wrote my first novel when I was 13 and a fictional diary when I was 15”. He also has two volumes of poetry, Mármol (2017) and Barro (2018). When it was his turn to graduate from high school, he anticipated his parents’ move and traveled to the capital, Álava, where his family originally came from. I was alone and in a new institute. “I arrived as an open-minded girl and it was very tough. They called me puritanical, nun and arrogant and I was bullied. From the most popular person to withdrawal and isolation. During the break, the students took to the streets. Bea didn’t have a gang and she stayed on the toilet and read. There he forgot about the bullying. And so two years.
Printing ended in Pamplona, where he studied advertising. He discovered theater groups. Her first job came as a trainee director on Akelarre, a film directed by Pablo Agüero. And from there to assistant director in Baby, a thriller by Juanma Bajo Ulloa. In January 2021 and after I graduated from Prague Film School everything accelerated. Tula premiered at the Medina del Campo Festival last February and since then has continued to complete the list of winners with more than one award a month. Beatriz de Silva already knows who she is and what she wants.
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