The Yellow Ceiling

The Yellow Ceiling.

The Yellow Ceiling explains and denounces the Case of the Lleida Theater Classroom through its protagonists. In 2018, a group of 9 women filed a complaint against two of their teachers for sexual abuse that occurred between 2001 and 2008, when they were teenagers. It was too late. Out of fear, out of shame, because it took them a long time to understand and digest what had happened, the complaint came when the case had already been prescribed and was filed.

Director.

Isabel Coixet’s first approach to cinema was through an 8mm camera given for her First Communion. Graduated in History from the University of Barcelona, she worked in her early years in advertising and copywriting.
She won several awards for her spots, and in 2000 she founded her own production company, Miss Wasabi Films. Her debut as a screenwriter and director was in 1989 with Too Old to Die Young, nominated for Best New Director at the Spanish Goya Awards. In 1996 she made her first feature in English, Things I Never Told You, her second Goya nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Coixet partnered up with a French production company, and in 1998 she came back to the Spanish script to shoot the historical adventure To Those Who Love. Her international success came in 2003 with the intimate drama My Life Without Me, a film based on a short story by Nancy Kincaid. Two years later she directed The Secret Life of Word. The film was awarded with four Goyas: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Production and Best Screenplay. In 2005, Coixet joined 18 international filmmakers, including Gus Van Sant, Walter Salles, and Joel and Ethan Coen, for the innovative collective project Paris, je t’aime.
Coixet has also made outstanding documentaries such as Invisibles, a Panorama selection for the 2007 Berlinale about Doctors without Borders; or Journey to the Heart of Torture, filmed in Sarajevo during the Balkan War. In 2008 she released Elegy, shot in Vancouver and produced by Lakeshore Entertainment. In 2009, the film Map of the Sounds of Tokyo premiered in the official selection of the Cannes Film Festival. During the same year, she opened From I to J, an installation homage to John Berger’s work, at the Centre d’Arts Santa Monica. In 2009, she was awarded the gold medal in Fine Arts, and she is a member of the 59th Berlin Film Festival jury. In 2010, she was in charge of the content of one of the three rooms of the Spanish pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo. In addition, she opened the Aral exhibition. The Lost Sea, in which the documentary with the same title, shot in Uzbekistan during the previous year, is shown. In 2011 she made her debut in the Berlinale Specials section of the Berlin International Film Festival with the documentary Listening to Juez Garzón. The film won the Goya for Best Documentary. During 2012 she directed Marea Blanca, a documentary about the 10 years since the catastrophe that struck the Galician coast in 2002. In the same year, she wrote, produced, and directed her new project, Yesterday Never Ends, presented in the Panorama section of the 63rd edition of the Berlin International Film Festival.
At the end of 2012 she wrote and directed Another Me, a thriller shot between Wales and Barcelona. During the summer of 2013, filming began on Learning to Drive, an American production shot in New York, based on an article published in the New York Times, and premiered at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. Nobody Wants the Night was shot between Norway, Bulgaria and the Canary Islands, and starred Juliette Binoche, Rinko Kikuchi and Gabriel Byrne. The film opened the 66th Berlin International Film Festival, and earned Coixet three Gaudí Award nominations, winning one, nine Goya nominations, winning three, and a Platinum Award nomination. Coixet also directed Spain in a Day, a collective film that shows how a day in Spain looks like, October 24, 2015, through images recorded by anonymous people with their tablets, phones and cameras.
In 2015 Coixet received the Chevalier des arts et des lettres Medal from the French Ministry of Culture. In 2017 she released The Bookshop, an adaptation from Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, starring Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson and Bill Nighy. It won the awards for Best Director, Best Picture Film and Best Adapted Screenplay during the 32nd edition of the Goya Awards.
Elisa and Marcela, released in the spring of 2019 on Netflix, tells the story of two women who got married at the beginning of the 20th century in Galicia, Spain. Her first series, Foodie Love, aired on HBO in 2019. It explores human relationships through the encounters of a couple and the delicacy and diversity of food. At the beginning of 2020, just before the pandemic broke out, she shot her latest film, It Snows in Benidorm, produced by El Deseo.