Sundays of Alauda Ruiz de Azúa started as the great favorite of the Goya awards 2026 and it ended consecrated with five awards: film, direction, script, leading and supporting actress. “We are very happy. Since the project was born we felt that it was a risky proposal, so receiving all the affection from our classmates has been very special,” said its director after triumphing with her feature film about a teenager who decides to become a nun.
The filmmaker, author of five little wolves –for which he won Best New Director in 2022– and the series To want, He explained that he had “never” experienced a project that “grew so much” in terms of viewers, media impact and social conversation. A context that at a certain point ended up becoming “a little uncomfortable,” but that he reversed by learning that “if you open an uncomfortable conversation, the promotion and what surrounds the film has to be uncomfortable at some point.”
Alauda Ruiz de Azua acknowledged that when he thinks about his works, his focus is on the “type of dilemmas and questions that it will generate, not on predicting the reactions of any generation.” In what it has meant Sundayscommented that they have verified that in the case of those over forty, they have detected that the debate has focused more on religion, while young people “used religion to connect with the film from another place, such as individual freedom or how difficult it is to see yourself judged in the family.” “It has been nice that the vocation has been an excuse to talk about other things,” he highlighted.
The director took the opportunity to send a hopeful and motivating message to all women who consider devoting themselves to cinema: “Making a film is never easy, but go for it without fear, and don’t let yourself be fooled by the impostor syndrome, because I have a great obsession with that. It is not mandatory to feel like an imposter, neither in the cinema nor in life.”
Receive a project when you need it
Patricia Lopez Arnaizwho received the Goya for Best Leading Actress for her role as the aunt of the young woman who wants to become a nun, explained that she was excited to be awarded for this character, because for her it had been “especially special, excuse the redundancy.”
The interpreter shared that, in a conversation with the rest of the nominees in her category (Ángela Cervantes, Nora Navas, Susana Abaitua and Antonia Zegers), they agreed that it is “very curious how characters come to you at a super opportune moment in your life. That you suddenly have to put yourself in the shoes of someone who, for some reason in your personal life, you need or that suits you. Synchronicities occur.” “I feel a very intimate bond with this character, as if this was the character I had to meet,” he said.
Regarding the process of preparing Sundayspointed out that the most interesting thing for her was the documentation phase that Alauda Ruiz de Azua shared with her, about how the recruitment of young people into sects is carried out. “I saw many documentaries about women trying to get out,” she explained about the interest that the manipulation that takes place in these cases generated in her, through numerous testimonies from people who went through it.
A “complex” project to sell
The film’s producers, who accompanied Alauda at the meeting with the media after the gala, acknowledged that Sundays It had been a complex project to sell at the beginning, and in fact, at the beginning they tried to prevent the word “nun” from appearing in the synopsis itself. “We approached it with a lot of respect, for months we avoided the word nun, but how can you tell this story without saying that it is about a girl who wants to become a nun? It was like that until we decided to embrace it and communicate it because we firmly believed in it,” said Sandra Hermida.
For everyone, upon receiving the script, it was a surprise that the director had chosen to investigate this topic. “We trusted her and as soon as we started having conversations, debates and discussions among ourselves, we discovered that there was much more to discover in this story,” they applauded how, during the process, they also realized that “in 2026 it was a topic that could be perfectly current and current.” In fact, they confessed that they even considered setting the plot decades before the present day in which it ended up being framed. Sundays.
De Bad Bunny a Quevedo
Pope Leo XIV will visit Spain between June 6 and 12. Asked if he would like Sundays reached him, producer Sandra Hermida suggested that perhaps he had “already seen” the film. “It will coincide in Madrid with Bad Bunny. I hope the film reaches Bad Bunny and the Pope,” said Alauda Ruiz de Azua, alluding to the fact that both will coincide in Madrid since these are the dates on which the Puerto Rican will perform in the capital.
The team shared that in the introduction of the script there was a phrase from the singer, “God is in our hearts,” but that after staging a sequence with Quevedo’s song Not even drunkwhich also addresses this topic, concluded that “it had become clear that there were references.”
