Rodrigo Garcia Melero |
Buenos Aires (EFE) “My life is work and work is my life,” this famous Argentine tells EFE, who became known as an actress in Spain in the 1980s when, she says, there was no more freedom than now.
“It cannot be said that at that time we were freer than we are now, no. Gender rights have evolved, in many things that were not like that at that time, and that is freedom. In social rights, human rights, in relation to women…”, explains the interpreter.
Roth, born in Buenos Aires in 1956, winner of two Goya Awards for Best Leading Actress for “Martín (Hache)” (Adolfo Aristarain, 1997) and “Todo sobre mi madre” (Almodóvar, 1999), remembers how four decades ago It was normal for an actor in a movie to “touch an actress’s ass saying: ‘come on, little girl…’”.
“Well no, now it is not like that, and that is greater freedom,” he adds, and acknowledges that that freedom of the 80s, in the case of Spain, had a “sense” after leaving the dictatorship. “Now that freedom is different from this freedom that we live now, which is as naturalized and it is not like that: we must fight for it every day, as for democracy,” he remarks.
“It’s part of my life”
Daughter of the writer and journalist Abrasha Rotenberg and the singer and pianist Dina Rot, and sister of the musician Ariel Rot, she made her debut in Argentine cinema in the same 1976 when the whole family fled to Spain fleeing the military dictatorship (1976-1983). .
Madrid then became his talisman in full democratic effervescence. “I wouldn’t call it exile. If you call it exile, that’s something else. Exile is very hard; I did not live it as an exile, I lived it as an adventure that later became real and everyday life. I did not return to Buenos Aires for 11 years, ”he recalls.
His participation in “Arrebato” (Iván Zulueta, 1979), a cult film from the Madrid scene, was one of his first forays into Spanish cinema. Times in which he met Almodóvar, a relationship that still lasts.
“It is part of my life, it continues to be, absolutely. I’m interested and I care what he thinks, I’m interested and I like talking to him, I love him. It is a very long story, which can be told backwards but also forwards”, he indicates.
‘Almodóvar Girl’ in all stages of the filmmaker, her role as Manuela in “All about my mother”, Oscar for best foreign film, marked her resume. “When you finish making a character, that character is already part of you, of some organ of your body (…) and he is already there forever”, she emphasizes.
The dream? from Hollywood
Also the muse of her ex-partner, the singer-songwriter Fito Páez, with whom she adopted a son, Martín, she is honest about whether American cinema tempted her: “They have always offered me things that I, in my country, neither in Argentina nor in Spain would have done . So because it’s Hollywood I’m going to do them? Well no”.
But work is not lacking. He has just released his latest film as the protagonist, “Las fiestas” (Ignacio Rogers), and a documentary to which he gives voice, “En cumplimiento del debero”, by Jorge Gaggero, which addresses the alleged plot of corruption surrounding the fire, in 2014, from a warehouse in Buenos Aires belonging to the American firm Iron Mountain, in which several firefighters and rescue workers died.
“It was an intentional fire because this warehouse, very precarious, also kept private documentation from large national and international companies, banks, etc… Secret material. (…) There were 10 deaths; two more committed suicide some time later and the story is not resolved, justice has not been done to it, it has not been investigated, ”he points out.
Asked if every artist should have a political and social commitment, Roth -who on several occasions has shown affinity with Kirchnerism- asserts that the artist “tells his time” and that “is political”, that “it is not far” from anything of what we do.
Recovered from the fracture of the sacrum that she suffered in 2022, she will soon return to Spain to record “La Mesías”, a series by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, and in 2024 she will return to the theater with “Los días feliz”, by Samuel Beckett, directed by Lluís Pasqual.
The intense activity of an icon that, despite its beauty, is blunt: “I never felt like an erotic myth, not at all,” he concludes.