The director and screenwriter Josefina Molina died this Saturday in Madrid at the age of 89, a death that closes the career of one of the pioneers of audiovisual direction in Spain and a decisive figure in the incorporation of the female gaze into cinema and television.
The filmmaker from Córdoba received the Goya of Honor in 2012 and then became the first film director to obtain that distinction. She was also the founder of CIMA in 2006, the Association of Women Filmmakers and Audiovisual Media, which she later chaired honorarily. The wake has been set at the Boadilla del Monte Mortuary from 4:00 p.m. The Film Academy has reported his death, while CIMA has specified, according to EFE, that Molina died at his home in Madrid. The association has defined it as “one of the most important women in cinema “Spanish, feminist, tireless fighter for equality.”
Born in Córdoba in 1936, shortly after the start of the Civil War, she discovered her vocation at the age of 15 after seeing the riverby Jean Renoir. Before entering the Official Film School, he participated in cineforums and colloquiums, created a amateur theater company and collaborated on the radio program show lifewhere she directed the feminist section “Women and Cinema.” Her training at the Official Film School marked one of the central milestones of her career: she was the first woman to graduate in Film Direction at that institution, in the 60s.
During that stage he combined his studies with his work as a production assistant in Spanish Television. In 1968 he directed an adaptation of The metamorphosisby Franz Kafka, and later developed an extensive career on the small screen with titles such as The pathbased on the novel by Miguel Delibes, and Teresa of Jesusstarring Concha Velasco.
The writer and journalist Juan Sanguino analyzes the 2026 Goya gala.
His leap into film came in 1973 with Vera, a cruel storystarring Fernando Fernán-Gómez, Julieta Serrano and Alfredo Mayo. But his most recognized work is night functionreleased in 1981. The film addressed unusual issues in Spanish cinema of the time, such as gender inequality, female sexuality and the emotional consequences of divorce, based on a conversation between Lola Herrera and Daniel Dicenta playing themselves after the failure of their marriage.
His career received some of the country’s main cultural recognitions. In addition to the Goya of Honor in 2012, she was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts and the National Cinematography Awardand was the first woman director of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. The Film Academy has remembered her in a tribute note cited by EFE as “one of the bravest directors of her generation because she dared to do what she wanted, an act that represented a revolution.” In that same memory, the institution rescued one of its reflections on audiovisual creation: “To see the world clearly you have to have two eyes and Humanity takes one-eyed for too long”.
