Chelo Loureiro

VALENTINA is her first animated feature film as director. Since its recent release, it has won the Goya Award for Best Animated Film and the Film Critics Medal and is nominated for the Platinum and Quirino Awards.
Specialized in the management of companies with activities related to the Cultural Industries (Communication, Literature, Cinema and Plastic Arts), she has been working exclusively in the audiovisual sector for years, and in 2007 she founded her own production company, ABANO PRODUCIÓNS.
Member of the Board of Directors of CIMA (Association of Female Filmmakers), member of the Academy of Arts and Spanish Cinematographic Sciences and of the Galician Academy of Audiovisual Arts and Sciences (Academia Galega do Audiovisual). She teaches masterclasses in animation production for different Spanish and Latin American Universities. As producer, she has produced TV series, short films, documentaries and feature films receiving multiple national and international awards, always betting on an auteur’s cinema of high quality, as well as supporting young filmmakers. She is currently producing the feature film by Alberto Vázquez: UNICORN WARS, and the feature film by Isabel Herguera: SULTANA’S DREAM.

Director’s statement
When I was two years old, my sister contracted polio, so from then on, I lived with girls and boys with special difficulties, because in the countless number of hospitalizations my sister had to go through, with many months-long stays, we had the opportunity to learn dozens of stories of children with syndromes, disorders, malformations or problems that made them different from everyone else. And I saw that they lived their childhood in all normality, because their hospitalizations and their differences were normal to them because it was their everyday life. But as soon as they left their everyday lives, it was everyone else who made them feel strange.
From then on, I toyed with the idea of the need to tell a story starring a little one who was considered different. Different in the eyes of everyone else, because Valentina feels, dreams, laughs, gets annoyed and lives her adventure like any other girl. Valentina suffers the metamorphosis that we all go through in our process of growing up and ends up transforming herself —thanks to not losing her enthusiasm, her curiosity, and her unconditional love for her grandmother—, into a self-confident butterfly, convinced of what we all already knew: that she is unique.
It took me almost sixty years and a lot of accumulated experience to dare to make this endearing — for me, without a doubt — opera prima. It’s never too late... For many years, I’ve been producing animation and, above all, animated short films with young filmmakers with whom it’s essential to engage because of the specific connotations of animated audiovisuals, in which any minor mistake may entail a cost that could ruin a project. This has obliged me to roll up my sleeves on many occasions and rewrite scripts or re-plan shots and sequences. [...]
The production of this adventure has been a real exercise in perseverance: in the middle of the production process of the film, we were struck by the coronavirus pandemic, dealing with the strange circumstances in which the whole world has been engulfed. But with the certainty, like that which Valentina herself achieves after her journey, that adapting to the environment, added to one’s own will, leads us to achieve much more than we thought possible.