The final prize of the invincible podium celebrating the 15th anniversary of D’A – Barcelona Film Festival. After Béla Tarr and Bruno Dumont, it was Joanna Hogg’s turn.
On April 1st, the CCCB Theatre hosted the award ceremony and a conversation with the British filmmaker. The festival director reaffirmed D’A’s commitment to both established and emerging female directors. The first award went to Céline Sciamma in 2023, followed by Alice Rohrwacher last year.
This time, another filmmaker had the honor of speaking about “her” Joanna Hogg and presenting the award. Seville-born director Celia Rico (Journey to a Mother’s Room), jury member of this year’s Un Impulso Colectivo, said she feels so close to Hogg’s cinema that sometimes she imagines Joanna makes films just for her. She admires her ability to “find spaces of beauty among ghosts, whispers, and intimacies.”
After the screening of Présages, a short film commissioned by the Centre Pompidou, Joanna Hogg took to the stage to receive the audience’s applause. Elegant, reserved, measured—perhaps a touch shy—Hogg simply said: “I don’t make films to win awards, but it’s lovely to receive one like this.” Présages isn’t particularly representative of her work, as she herself admits. And yet, together—her and us—we concluded that it does reflect a transitional moment. In fact, the Pompidou’s commissioned series for filmmakers revolves around a crucial question: “Where are you at?” Joanna openly admits she’s not quite sure.
As film critic Eulàlia Iglesias—Hogg’s interlocutor during a conversation that lasted over an hour—pointed out, the diptych The Souvenir (2019 and 2021, D’A 2023) marked the culmination of an aesthetic and emotional trajectory traced throughout her filmography. “Now I feel less restrained, but perhaps more confused.”
Taking advantage of this state of mind, Hogg has taken to holding the camera herself again, like when she was seventeen and worked as a photographer. She is the cinematographer of the Pompidou short, as well as of Autobiografia di una Borsetta (2025), a commission for Miu Miu Women’s Tales. “The short format is working really well for me—even working with non-actors.” She tells us this because she’s usually obsessive about focusing on one single project. “Right now, for the first time, I’m trying to branch out and be more productive.” We’re not sure if this new drive was sparked by the cold rejection from a mysterious actress (or actor?) who turned down the lead in her next feature, set in Los Angeles. “I had never written a role for a specific actor. And well…”
Between one confession and another, there was time to discover that she was the one who introduced Tilda Swinton to Derek Jarman; that the catalyst for writing her debut feature, Unrelated—after years of frustration working in television—was a poem she wrote for her father’s funeral; that she distances herself from “class-based” readings of her work (“I’m interested in human behavior”); and that she finds scripts useless (since Archipelago (2010), she’s been writing illustrated literary novellas instead).
Best of luck in this new phase—whether in Los Angeles or wherever you choose to take us next.
-Marc Barceló
