Cuban Filmmaker and Team Celebrate Goya Nomination

“We’re very happy, although I know that the competition was tough,” Solaya told EFE, admitting that she always held out the “hope” of being nominated for the film at the 30th edition of the Goya awards.

“Vestido de novia” was selected by the Spanish Academy of Motion Pictures and Arts to compete for the Goya along with “El clan,” a Spanish-Argentine co-production directed by Pablo Trapero; documentary “La once,” by Chile’s Maite Alberdi, and “Magallanes,” by Peru’s Salvador del Solar.

The Cuban director said that the selection is an honor that makes her work visible and gives distinction to her main film effort, and she sees the nomination as “a great prize” because “when one works with passion, I think that things flow.”

“We identify ourselves greatly with this award, it’s a tremendous joy. I’m very proud, and my team and I are going to celebrate,” she said.

“Vestido de novia” is a dramatic story about transsexuality, sexual violence and double standards, recreating the worst years of the Cuban economic crisis in the 1990s.

The director was inspired by real events and tells the story of transsexual Rosa Elena, a 40-year-old nurse’s aide who is recently married to Ernesto, a construction engineer.

The cast includes some of the best-known actors in Cuban film, including Laura de la Uz, Luis Alberto Garcia, Isabel Santos and Jorge Perugorria.

The film, which made its screening debut last year at the Havana Film Festival, is a Spanish-Cuban co-production that took 10 years to come to fruition.

Solaya in 2010 completed a documentary entitled “En el cuerpo equivocado” (In the wrong body) based on the testimony of Mavi Susel, the first Cuban transsexual to undergo a sex-change operation on the island in 1988 and whose story was one of the ones that was incorporated into the script for “Vestido de novia.”