The Quiet Maid explores precarity and power through the lens of class injustice.
The Quiet Maid (Calladita) opens with a young woman wiping a yellow cloth over an almost invisible glass pane. It is a fitting start for a film which draws attention to potentially imperceptible barriers both on screen and off. Miguel Faus’ debut feature follows Ana (Paula Grimaldo), a live-in maid from Colombia, as she works for a family of art dealers in Costa Brava. The wavering promise that they will secure her immigration papers once the summer ends puts Ana in a vulnerable position. This is juxtaposed with Ana’s ability to impact the family’s day-to-day life on an intimate, intricate level. These murky dynamics are played with visually and narratively by Faus throughout the film.
The Quiet Maid’s London premiere took place on June 20th at Raindance Film Festival, where it was nominated for Best Debut Feature, Best Debut Director and Best Performance in a Debut. Paula Grimaldo who played Ana in the movie, won in the Best Performance category. But the film had already found acclaim across the pond, where Ocean’s Eleven director Steven Soderbergh granted it a Finishing Funds Award and accompanying $100,000. Soderbergh also acted as an advisor to the team during post-production; his involvement “has been a dream come true,” Faus told Mission.
Yet, prior to the recognition – and grant – from Soderbergh, Faus “found only closed doors and rejections” when trying to obtain funding. Mimicking the skirting of barriers which the film interrogates, Faus found an alternative route to financing his debut: NFTs. The Spanish filmmaker raised €750,000 selling digital art from a fifteen minute version of Calladita. In this way the film was supported financially “by over 600 collectors from all around the world”. Faus describes the experience as “a crazy amount of work, much harder and [more] intense than pitching the film to a TV network, streamer or public funding body”. Although he is not averse to going to the same lengths again to get a project made, he speaks candidly about the fact that he only turned to more innovative methods out of necessity.
“I was fascinated by all the contrasts and conflicts that this situation inherently offered.”
Faus’ unorthodox route to funding permeates the plot of the feature, as the central family collect and sell digital art. But conversation surrounding NFTs does not overwhelm the art the audience came to see: Faus had written most of the screenplay “before [he] even knew what an NFT was”, and The Quiet Maid contends with popular cinematic themes of recent years. Reminiscent of films such as Roma and Parasite and possessing a White Lotus-esque combination of satire and moneyed seduction, The Quiet Maid explores the tensions that arise from precarious work and abuses of power. The line between the opulence Ana is surrounded by and her own unsteady situation is constantly recontextualized and destabilized. This is achieved not only through her interactions with – and subversion of – the family she works for, but also through the cinematography. The camera follows Ana’s movements through the villas and vistas of the Costa Brava, enabling Faus to interrogate the lens through which we define power. “I was fascinated by all the contrasts and conflicts that this situation inherently offered,” the director told Mission. The titular maids “are overall quite powerless in their situation, but can access a paradoxical power because they see, hear, and know everything that happens in these houses.”
The focus on Ana reverses what Faus feels is the expectation that live-in domestic workers “be as small and invisible and quiet as possible. The house must be clean and tidy, and the food must be cooked, but ideally these things would be done by a ghost.” Ana navigates her place in the house at the same time as she grapples with her place in the wider world – as any young woman does. The film considers how an unstable work situation might reach its tentacles into every aspect of identity, including relationships with romantic partners, friends and family. In spite of its title, then, The Quiet Maid has a lot to say. It seems its director is finding a way to ensure this message is heard.
Imagery courtesy of Miguel Faus.
