Originally published on Ink19 on October 19, 2026
Interview conducted by Lily and Generoso on October 18, 2025
With her debut, I Have Electric Dreams (Tengo sueños eléctricos), Valentina Maurel proved to be a master of sifting through the intricacies and paradoxes of family dynamics, specifically between father and daughter, along with the challenges of having artists as parents. With her latest feature, Forever Your Maternal Animal (Siempre soy tu animal materno), Maurel pushes these ideas further and incorporates impressive ambiguities and disconnections we experience too often in real-life, producing an effortless naturalness as it tracks the existential crises of three women: a mother, scholar, and poet, Isabel (Marina De Tavira), and her two daughters, Elsa (Daniela Marín Navarro) and Amalia (Mariangel Villegas).
Elsa, the eldest daughter, acts as our ambivalent guide through her complicated family and her hometown of San José, Costa Rica’s capital. She has returned after an extended period abroad in Europe, where she and her longtime partner, Sven, study anthropology. She’s uneasy about her future with Sven, and soon we realize that her homecoming may be beyond a visit. When Elsa goes back to her childhood home to see her sister Amalia, who has dropped out of college and has let the house fall into disrepair, Elsa focuses her efforts on trying to unravel where her sister went wrong.
However, Elsa stands alone in this endeavor: her parents accept Amalia’s deviation from the bourgeois goals of completing university and studying in Europe, and they pay far more attention to their own lives. A new romance with one of Elsa’s former classmates consumes the father’s attention. A rediscovery and republishing of her early erotic poems captures most of the mother’s care. In traversing the lives of her mother, father, and sister, Elsa’s own difficulties and inabilities in intimacy, fulfillment, and communication come to light, exposing unknown similarities and differences between herself, her mother, and her sister.
We had the opportunity to speak with Valentina Maurel as part of our coverage of AFI Fest 2026. In our discussion, we talked about the separation children must create from their parents, the ways that fiction allows reality to be rediscovered and reimagined, the obstacles that women face in navigating the world, and the director’s conflicted relationship with French cinema. Maurel’s films convey a deep awareness of everything that shifts and shapes us, and her responses in this conversation reflect the same wonderful perceptiveness.
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LF: To prepare for this conversation, we revisited your magnificent debut feature, I Have Electric Dreams, which shares similar themes to Maurice Pialat’s To Our Loves (À nos amours) in terms of the complexity and contradictions of father-daughter relationships, adolescence, and sexuality, as well as We Won’t Grow Old Together (Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble) in regards to the difficulties of intimacy and vulnerability in a relationship with an artistic person.
There are echoes of these ideas in Forever Your Maternal Animal, but you expand on them by including the mother-daughter relationship and sisterhood. Was Pialat a formative filmmaker for you? If so, were there any adjustments from that inspiration that you had to make for a female gaze or as a woman director?
VM: That’s a good question, but I have to say no, at first. Since I grew up in Costa Rica, I wasn’t really in touch with French filmmakers for obvious reasons. There weren’t arthouse movie theaters there, so most of my cinema discoveries were through television, which is a bit strange, and I mostly encountered American filmmakers first because, when I was a teenager, I found this channel that would play weird films after midnight, and I even fantasized back then that I would meet the programmer of these films to show my appreciation for their very good picks. Through that channel, I first saw the films of John Waters, John Cassavetes, Todd Solondz, and Hal Hartley, and so those were my earliest filmmakers. Then, when I arrived in France when I was nineteen, I started seeing the films of Godard and Jean Eustache, and I really didn’t like them (laughs). I hated them because I have a French father, and I suddenly had this feeling that French cinema took itself too seriously. I also have to say, because we spoke about comic books before this interview, that I was a huge fan of the medium, especially the comics that had a dark humor like those of Ivan Brunetti and Daniel Clowes, and American poetry as well. I was influenced by all of that. When I started making films, I had all of those references in my mind. I then left France and moved to Belgium, and I rejected French cinema for a while, but then when I got deeper into making films, I started to watch French cinema, as it’s easier to watch when you’re in the process of creating. Films that took themselves so seriously became less intimidating once I was making films of my own, and during that time, I also started watching Pialat and Eric Rohmer. I particularly like Rohmer because he allows dialogue to be the center of his work.
As for Pialat, you cited two films, To Our Loves and We Won’t Grow Old Together. I like the latter very much, as I can relate to it. On the other hand, I don’t want to watch To Our Loves because it’s such an iconic film here in France. As you can tell, I have a real distance from French cinema, but at the same time, I now realize that I have a lot in common with Pialat in the way that he directs his actors. I’m not as monstrous as he was, but I admire that he refused to say “action” when he was shooting because he didn’t appreciate how that practice noticeably separates reality and fiction. He felt that when he said “action” actors would stop being real and go into a character, and that is a technique that I prefer to do as well in my own work. Eventually, Pialat became a director whom I like a lot without previously knowing I would.
LF: Someone who has an energy you appreciated long before you connected with the work?
VM: Yes and his non-romantic approach to characters.
GF: In many senses, I Have Electric Dreams and Forever Your Maternal Animal could be considered as a diptych on a child’s relationship with their parent. You beautifully explore the spectrum of devotion in that relationship: from love to fascination to obsession for one’s own father or mother. How conscious are you of all of these aspects as you write each character and their interactions with their parents?
VM: Well, I am not so conscious about any particular thing when I write. I like to write scenes and then see how characters evolve, but I do know that I am always curious about what it means to be the child of artists. If, in life, you have to go through killing the father and killing the mother to grow up, evolve, and find yourself, it’s even more difficult when you’re the child of an artist because you also have to kill art or an idea of art (laughs). That background instills in you a mistrust of the idea of beauty or the idea of poetry, and that is something I am always interested in exploring in my work. I try to make films that explore the family dynamic and its relationship with art.
LF: While the child’s perspective is seminal to your films, parents grappling with their children becoming adults is an important element as well. During this transitional time, the children emerge as representations of a previous time in life while also being a factor that forces a parent to look towards the future. For example, Eva and Elsa represent a spirit of youth and a more Bohemian period that their respective fathers (played by the same actor, Reinaldo Amién) are trying to recover.
VM: There is something about the blurriness of the roles in a family between the generations that I’m drawn to, especially the ambiguity of who is really taking care of whom or who is the more responsible. I think that interest is specific to the artistic middle class, which is what I was raised in. My parents’ generation sought to change the authoritarian way that people raised their children with its normal patriarchal construct, so the way my parents raised us created a lot of freedom, but it also had a very vertiginous outcome because the parents become the children in a way. In my work, I never attempt to morally judge my characters, but instead, I try to represent the ambivalence to this unorthodox familial structure.
GF: Just yesterday, as part of AFI Fest, we previewed Beatrice Gibson’s film, At Night, and in it, a woman in her 40s discusses her regrets around erotic art she created when she was younger. This immediately made us think about the mother, Isabel, in your film and her difficult feelings surrounding the republication of her early erotic poetry. We found it an interesting contradiction: she spends so much time trying to look youthful, but she simultaneously rejects the work of her youth. What do feel Isabel gains by the contemporary acceptance of her early poems?
VM: When you make very intimate art, that art blends into some period of time from your life. For me, Isabel is someone who didn’t realize how the prosaic overtook her reality. She didn’t remember the inspiration for the poems she created in her youth that superseded everyday life. She wrote those poems to a man whom she doesn’t love anymore: in fact, she despises him now, so it becomes difficult for her to see the value in her poetry from that time. Even the value of her own youth becomes something that she is ashamed of. So the reconciliation Isabel finds with her own work, that even leads to the re-ignition of her desire to write, happens in the gaze she has with her former husband during a public reading of the poems towards the end of the film. In that moment, she accepts that he is no longer the man whom she wrote for and about, and she is not the young woman who wrote those words anymore. But the poems exist, and the ideas behind them are more important than who they are as people today.
I feel that this has something to do with poetry as well as love. When I wrote the screenplay, I thought that this film would be about a house that is haunted by a ghost, with the ghost being the love that these people had for one another that was just too big. Once the love was gone, they had no idea what to do without it. It’s difficult to live your life after that, as it all feels so banal. In the end, when you come to the conclusion that the rest of life outside of that experience is banal, and you fully understand that those poems existed during a more intense time, you can accept it all.
For me, Isabel is more ashamed of the love she had for her husband than the erotic nature of her work, but I believe that is for a very personal reason. This element is autobiographical, as my own mother back in the 1980s wrote erotic poetry in Costa Rica, which was an odd thing, as Costa Rica was a very conservative society then, and as her mother was a politician, it became a big issue at the time. Still, I believe that my mother has no shame in regards to the erotic nature of her poems, but like Isabel, she feels uneasy about the poems being written about a man whom she doesn’t love anymore. Also, in my family, sexuality and love are the same thing, so you can be ashamed of both (laughs).
LF: At the end of the day, both are methods of intimacy, and you can be embarrassed of how that intimacy was communicated and conveyed.
VM: Well, I’ll say that the daughters in my film have the same difficulties accessing desire…
LF: We really love how the graffiti odes to Yelina scattered throughout your first film culminate in the ending when Eva and her father are arrested. It’s oddly comedic and cathartic. In your new film, there is one single piece of graffiti that plays a radically different role. We never understand fully who did it, but you provide some clues. What led you to repurpose this motif for Forever Your Maternal Animal?
VM: It’s a mix of things. First, I am always aware of the graffiti I see, and I have a penchant for writing down the words. Once I collect these words, I also want to give the surrounding city a voice. This anonymous voice in the film is a companion to the characters in my debut feature, and it watches over the characters in my new film. I like this invisible presence in Forever Your Maternal Animal. I appreciate how the camera is positioned above the characters and how it watches them. It is a somewhat threatening presence, but it’s not a ghost. Instead, it is like a moral gaze of the city. It’s perhaps more banal than that. It says something about Elsa’s own guilt about her sexuality because she believes that the “puta” graffiti could be directed at her. This specific graffiti, the writing of the word “puta,” happened to me personally. During my youth, there was a neighbor who wrote “puta” on the walls of our home, and there was a lot of speculation as to why he was doing this. We never found out the reason then, and we still don’t know now (laughs). Was it because of my mother’s work or because of the fact that there were two teenage girls living in the house? This incident stayed with me because it raised all of these questions about who we were.
LF: That’s fascinating. I love the uncertainty in motive and interpretation as you describe it. The graffiti could’ve been written simply by an unhappy neighbor. But it could also be a moral judge or a manifestation of some kind of societal hostility as well.
GF: In terms of societal hostility in your film, there is also the scene when Amalia and Elsa are walking down the street and passersby are yelling “puta” at them.
VM: You should know that this scene on the street happened for real when we were shooting, so I kept it in the film. The street where that occurred is the very street that I grew up on. I am Latin American, but I’m also French, and I now live in Europe, so when I made my first film, some members of the Costa Rican arts scene said, “You’re casting your European gaze on us and making us seem miserable.” So, for this film, I thought, “I will film on the street where I was raised, and you can see for yourselves that this is not fiction: this is the reality from my experience.” I would take that street from my house to visit neighbors. There are many cars driving down it, so when you’re a teenage girl, and you walk down this street, this is how you are treated, even when there are cameras filming and people can see your bad behavior.
GF: I applaud your decision to leave that in, Valentina. It’s like the scene in John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy that occurred in real life while they were filming: when a taxi almost hit Dustin Hoffman, he managed to stay in character as Ratso Rizzo and yelled at the cabbie. Dustin lived in NYC at the time, and when his instincts took over, his reaction felt right, so the director kept it in the final cut. This brings me back to your first feature and that remarkable scene at the end when Eva and her father are sitting in patrol cars and they both separately realize that the Yelina of the graffiti is a police officer. They both laugh as it’s absurd, but that scene immediately follows the moment when Eva’s father tries to strangle her to death and stops. That could be viewed as an ugly statement on contemporary Costa Rica, and I know that some might have questioned your choice there, but that moment, given their relationship throughout the film, feels honest to me.
VM: I’m glad you referenced Midnight Cowboy. Of course in the United States, that film is huge, but I saw it for the first time when I was a teenager, and I didn’t know many people in Costa Rica who were familiar with it. I remember this near accident in the film so clearly because when I saw it for the first time, a lightbulb went off and told me, “You can do this.”
I also want to comment on what you said about having something very funny after a dramatic moment. This mix of polar emotions does draw from reality, but it’s also true that the dramaturgy of films enables me to portray life truthfully. For me, the mix of laughing in the middle of a very miserable situation is something that happens a lot in regular life, and I try to keep the ethos that no sentiment is dignified. Of course, I must have heard Cassavetes say something to the effect that there’s nothing better than to laugh during a funeral. I thank these filmmakers for inspiring me to keep these elements in my work.
GF: There’s careful attention and thoughtfulness to how the three women are clothed, made up, and even surgically altered. Their presentation simultaneously complements and conflicts with how they see themselves or how they want to be seen in the world. This is, in a sense, a common feminine struggle, and it’s fascinating to see how it plays out differently between Elsa, Amalia, and their mother. Could you talk about your wardrobe and make up process and choices?
VM: It is very difficult for me to know how to make these choices sometimes. If you go by the book on filmmaking, you have to think about the clothing that a character wears and the possible aesthetics. The director of photography will want to have colors and textures that are well thought out in advance, but I make films with no money (laughs), so that is absolutely impossible for me. Therefore, I’ve developed a creative way to work around this limitation, which often has me asking the actors to wear their own clothing. There is also no backup clothing, like an actor having three of the exact same shirt in case one gets soiled. I don’t care about such things. If there isn’t a stain on a shirt in one scene, and then there’s stain on it in the next scene, that’s okay. I want my actors to feel like they own their characters’ clothing, which many times they do. But what I care the most about is the body because that’s what I work with and what I am the most fascinated by. For example, someone’s hair is messy because we play with the hair to make it feel alive. I guess that may be artificial as I make it messy on purpose.
I’m interested in how a character feels in their own body. In my short films, there is this male character who could not control his own erections and a girl who had a lice problem with her hair, and in my new film, there’s Isabel and her eye lift because I think that a character’s discomfort with their own body makes them more empathetic, as we’ve all had these moments ourselves. Furthermore, an unglamorous approach to the body makes the characters more human, more real. I hate films with only talking heads that fail to show any bodily aspects. So, to answer your question more directly, we choose the clothing, but we also rehearse in it. We, of course, have to wash these clothes a lot, but it has to be real clothing that has been used and not altered artificially for filming.
LF: To this point, I noticed how each female character shows more or less skin on different parts of the body. For example, Elsa covers up a lot. She does wear tank tops, but she also wears sweatpants. Amalia wears short skirts, and Isabel is dressed somewhere in between the two.
VM: I am very interested in how difficult it is to position yourself as a woman — what you can or cannot show or how pretty you have to be. That is something that I must put up with myself, and so I give this to my characters. But, of course, women look at each other this way as well: how you do your hair or why you put on so much makeup today. Are you trying to look good or trying not to look good? There is an aspect dedicated to that situation in I Have Electric Dreams.
My characters are usually educated people. They feel that they are above mediocrity or above the prosaic aspects of life, and as a woman artist, you wish that you were too, but then you still have to deal with regular judgements of your appearance. It not only knocks you back into regular life, but it also puts you back into the violence of patriarchy, even when you are part of a privileged class.
GF: Religion and faith are mentioned in passing in I Have Electric Dreams: when Eva and Diana mockingly react to an evangelical service that the housekeeper is watching as they swipe on Tinder and when Eva and her father are looking at a rental and are concerned that a nearby church will cause early morning noise. In your new film, faith plays a much larger role with Amalia, who adopts elements of Catholicism from her caretaker, Dora, who acted as a surrogate maternal figure to her and mixes it with other religions and spiritual practices. Religion also acts as a part of the embedded culture and geography. Do you feel that Amalia’s faith is more of a comment of her attachment to place or region, or is it more of an attempt to draw herself closer to Dora?
VM: It is both. Costa Rica is a very religious country, and even when you personally grow up without religion, religion is everywhere, so it’s in my films naturally. But in my second film, I wanted to talk about it because the relationship that Costa Rica has with religion allows Amalia to escape the bourgeois middle-class dream of going to Europe and going to a university. Religion provides an opportunity for Amalia to have her own vision of life away from the one her parents envision for her. Religion gives Amalia the possibility of having a relationship with Dora, but it also gives her the ability to say, “If I want to believe in God, the Illuminati, and Yoruba, I can.” In addition, to be candid, I personally have a critical perspective on religion. I am sad that my country has become so evangelical, but Amalia is different. She has a liberating approach to religion because she allows a kind of syncretism, and it gives her a measure of poetic license in life.
I didn’t theorize all of this when I wrote the film, but it became something I could see in a positive way. This also provides a comment about contemporary Costa Rica and the country’s history. As a nation, we overall feel that we are white because we have embraced European religion, erased all indigenous aspects from our popular culture, and pushed aside our Afro-Caribbean inheritance. Amalia has a way of mixing all of these undercurrents through her religious beliefs, which free her from the obsession with Europe that Elsa has and with it the bourgeois middle-class desire to study there. Amalia takes an aspect of Costa Rican culture and makes it her own.
LF: We understand that Isabel left Mexico for Costa Rica to be with Elsa and Amalia’s father. And Amalia talks of moving to Nicaragua to follow her boyfriend and to be close to Dora’s final resting place. So both Amalia and Isabel leave their home country for love. On the other hand, the reason why Elsa decides to go to Europe for school is left relatively unclear beyond hers or her parents’ desire for social ascension. By the end of the film, given the uncertain status of her relationship with Sven, how does Elsa look at her return to Europe?
VM: That’s a very detailed observation. Thank you! Love has a way of changing the way a woman structures her future. Elsa hesitates on whether or not she’ll return to Europe because she’s not sure if she loves Sven enough. Could she also fall in love with another man in her life? I must admit that I changed my mind many times on how the story would end for Elsa. I was full of doubt myself. I shoot my films chronologically so that I have the flexibility to change the characters’ outcomes, and that happened with Elsa because of my growing interest in Creepy as a character, so I made him reappear towards the end. Originally, as written, I had Elsa definitively going back to Europe, but then I allowed her character to have doubts in this final version because of my affinity for this new relationship with Creepy. Also, I find that major choices in life are more reactive and instantaneous than planned, like when one is shooting a film (laughs).
LF: I’m glad that you expanded on their relationship. We discussed this specific choice before the interview, as Elsa’s bedroom encounter with Creepy is one of the few moments where Elsa exhibits any amount of vulnerability. It’s a great scene when it comes to the dialogue and the varying emotions you see in that moment. There is grief. There is sadness. There is lust. And there’s regret. It’s a wonder to watch.
VM: I also love that scene, but people don’t usually bring it up because they don’t understand the meaning of it. When we shot it, I loved it so much that I asked the actor who played Creepy to come back. It had a lot of improvisation involved, and I am always trying to allow improvisation so that reality can emerge. Then, I keep shooting to allow reality and the fiction of the film to connect. That is possibly why this film feels more underwritten than I Have Electric Dreams: I allowed myself to have more accidents. Creepy’s return is one of those happy accidents!
Forever Your Maternal Animal (Siempre soy tu animal materno) screens at AFI Fest on Saturday October 24, at 2:45 p.m. with Valentina Maurel in attendance.
Featured photo courtesy of Unifrance. This interview was edited for length and clarity.
