{"id":11573,"date":"2026-04-25T09:36:19","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T09:36:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/11573\/"},"modified":"2026-04-25T09:36:19","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T09:36:19","slug":"i-always-sometimes-motherhood-on-the-breadline-in-barcelona","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/11573\/","title":{"rendered":"‘I Always Sometimes’: Motherhood on the Breadline in Barcelona\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tProduced with Javier Ambrossi<\/a> and Javier Calvo<\/a> (\u201cVeneno,\u201d \u201cLa Mes\u00edas\u201d), now Cannes Festival main competition contenders as directors of \u201cLa Bola Negra,\u201d Movistar Plus+<\/a> Original \u201cI Always Sometimes\u201d begins with love at first lust.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tLaura (Ana Boga), a festival organizer in Berlin, and Rub\u00e9n (David Men\u00e9ndez), a bar owner, meet at music fest Sonar and now walk the night-time streets of Barcelona quoting Rilke. They attend a rave on Montjuich, chill out in a chic bar owned by a friend of Ruben\u2019s, and have great sex, after which Rub\u00e9n proposes she moves in.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tCut to Ep. 2. Laura got pregnant one week after meeting Rub\u00e9n, has moved out \u2013 he proved a booze-addled wastrel \u2013 and is back with her suffocating parents. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tCreated by Marta Bassols<\/a> and Marta Loza<\/a>, all the remaining episodes are entitled by the place Laura squats with her infant child Mario as she desperately attempt find a flat of her own in Barcelona, a city awash with rich tourists and gentrification, and to earn enough money to bring Mario up, though she has to spend most of her time caring for him, which she loves.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cRent here is bloody insane. It\u2019s impossible to find anything,\u201d Laura complains to an artist friend. \u201cNothing\u2019s impossible,\u201d he retorts. \u201cFlats in Barcelona are,\u201d Laura replies with vehemence.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tA touching take on maternity grounded in the nightmarish economics of single motherhood and indeed current-day life, as well as the emotional chaos of an early thirty-something, \u201cI Always Something\u201d was released April 23 on Movistar Plus+ in Spain. It now makes its international debut at Canneseries in main international competition two days later.<\/p>\n

\n\tShot in six episodes, of 22-35 minutes, \u201cI Always Sometimes\u201d marks an auspicious writing debut from Bassols and Loza, and a case in point of the Javis\u2019 nurturing new talent in Spain. Bassols, who played Roberta in \u201cThis Is Not Sweden,\u201d was seen in \u201cLa Mes\u00edas\u201d; Loza served as art director on TV series \u201cMariliendre,\u201d also produced by Suma Content, the Javis production house. Directors are Claudia Costafreda, a writer on the Javis breakthrough \u201cVeneno\u201d before breaking out creating and directing \u201cCardo,\u201d produced by Ambrossi and Calvo. Ginesta has directed episodes of Canneseries winner \u201cPerfect Live\u201d and Netflix smash hit \u201cElite.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tVariety chatted to Las Martas in the run-up to Canneseries.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tLaura and Rub\u00e9n share their love of Rainer Maria Rilke, quoting a passage in \u201cLetters to a Young Poet\u201d where he advises that \u201cthe point is, to live everything.\u201d Laura, likewise, doesn\u2019t want her existence to be defined by being a single mother\u2026.<\/p>\n

\n\tBassols: Laura likes sex, life, her work, art, eating, being with her woman friends. She likes the same she\u2019d like if she wasn\u2019t a mother. Maternity does\u2019t eliminate what a person was before, nor occupy all their concerns. What Laura is doing is really important, but other things are really important to her. Her success is to see love and poetry all the time, despite her circumstances.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMost romances begin with normal life and build to a happy ending. \u201cI Always Sometimes\u201d is the other way round.<\/p>\n

\n\tBassols: Episode 1 is like what happens after the happy ending.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tLoza: This is the story of a young woman who\u2019s trying to find her way in life, and a million things happen to her. Episode 1 was originally Episode 4, a flashback. Editing, however, we realized we lacked context, which gave larger depth to the characters, and made the series much more original. You understand Laura more, where she comes from, her expectations, her origin, and so understand far more the rest of her journey.<\/p>\n

\n\tEpisodes vary in tone\u2026<\/p>\n

\n\tLoza: Every episode has a different color, set in a place that forms part of her life where Laura tries to find herself, from the position she\u2019s now in. Each episode is like an isolated story, which can be watched independently, inspired a lot by the show stories of Raymond Carver. She lives in a different house and in a way is looking for part of herself in the places where she was happy before becoming a mother, but something\u2019s changed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd how did you share directing?<\/p>\n

\n\tLoza: I directed the first episode, Claudia [Costafreda] directed the second,\u00a0 third and No. 6 and Ginesta [Guindal] 4 and 5.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd did you have any general guidelines, regarding direction?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tLoza: Since my episode was the first, the first romantic moments, I was clear that it had to be the opposite of the rest: sequence shots, giving space for the actors, with a lot of rehearsals so that the actors could make the dialogs theirs, incorporating improvisation to break with the text, and give everything a before-dawn feel. Ginesta\u2019s Episode 4, in contrast, where she Laura touches rock bottom, there are a lot of shots, editing, a sense of acceleration, and I think it works. Every episode had a different color, some warmer, some cold and Episode 6, set in Berlin, almost reaching black and white. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMost of the series, however, is set in Barcelona, which is crucial.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBorras: Yes, Barcelona comes across normally as a cool place, a vanguard city which everybody wants to visit. Our series catches the hostility of the city, its gentrification, \u201ctouristification,\u201d and the problem with flat rent prices, which are next to impossible.\u00a0 Barcelona is a great place to raise a child if you have a lot of money. There\u2019s the beach, parks, the climate. But we wanted \u201cI Always Sometimes\u201d to be full of nuance where the marvellous runs up against the hellish. And everybody in film can be good or bad at the same time and the series\u2019 title also defines the city as well. It\u2019s the ying and yang. Nobody is purely anything. Everybody is full of contradictions. What we like is to reflect and embrace them, those which can be worked on to become a better person\u2026<\/p>\n

\n\tThe series is described as a realistic vision of motherhood. It returns time and again to economic factors, which you don\u2019t see so much in titles with women protagonists\u2026<\/p>\n

\n\tLoza: The series talks about the difficulty of reconciling work and raising a child and enjoying that.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBorras: Neoliberalism is now so exacerbated that to live you have to put work at the center of your life when life should be at the center and work help you to be happier and live better.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tLaura (Ana Boga) juggling work and motherhood in \u2018I Always Sometimes\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Produced with Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo (\u201cVeneno,\u201d \u201cLa Mes\u00edas\u201d), now Cannes Festival main competition contenders as directors…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11574,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[92,7056,7057,7058,7059,6920],"class_list":["post-11573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-barcelona","tag-barcelona","tag-javier-ambrossi","tag-javier-calvo","tag-marta-bassols","tag-marta-loza","tag-movistar-plus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11573\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}