Hail Mary: Motherhood on Page and Screen: Post-screening discussion with author and academic Katixa Agirre

Posted 26 November 2025

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Sally Faulkner is Professor of Spanish (1933) at the University of Cambridge. She has published widely on Spanish cinema and TV, Portuguese film, and Film Studies. She is the author of Literary Adaptations in Spanish Cinema (Támesis-Boydell & Brewer, 2004, Spanish translation Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2023), A Cinema of Contradiction: Spanish Film in the 1960s (Edinburgh UP, 2006; expanded Spanish version, Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2022) and A History of Spanish Film: Cinema and Society 1910-2010 (Bloomsbury Academic 2013; Spanish translation Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2017), studies that have framed this national cinema within questions of aesthetics and intermediality, politics and dissent, and social mobility and the middlebrow. Her latest monograph, The Cinema of Cecilia Bartolomé: Feminism and Francoism, is forthcoming with Manchester UP in 2024. She is Principal Investigator of the international research project ‘Invisibles e insumisas / Invisíveis e insubmissas: Leading Women in Portuguese and Spanish Cinema and Television, 1970-1980,’ funded by the British government through an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant, with Nuria Triana Toribio (University of Kent, U.K.) and Hilary Owen (University of Oxford, U.K.).

Núria Triana Toribio is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Kent. She is an established scholar on the areas of national cinema and popular culture in Spain. She has worked in the universities of Manchester and Liverpool, before joining Kent in 2012. Her main research is in the fields of popular culture and subculture (Spanish Punk) and film cultures. Her latest monograph is Spanish Film Cultures (2016, bfi/Palgrave). She is the author of Spanish National Cinema (Routledge, 2003) and co-author of The Cinema of Álex de la Iglesia (Manchester University Press, 2007). She is also co-editor of the series ‘Spanish and Latin American Filmmakers’ for Manchester University Press.

Katixa Agirre is a Basque writer. She published the short story collections Sua falta zaigu (We Lack Fire) and Habitat, and is the author of numerous children’s books and the Amaia Lapitz saga for young adults. She published her first novel, Atertu arte itxaron (Wait Until It Clears Up), in 2015, a novel translated into Danish, Spanish, Bulgarian and German. Her novel Amek ez dute (Mothers Don’t, 2018) has been published in ten languages and the film adaptation is currently under production. Her most recent novel is Berriz zentauro (Centaur Again, 2022), set in a mid-21st century Paris. She has a PhD in Audio-visual Communication and lectures at the University of the Basque Country.

Maria Reyes Baztán serves as College Assistant Professor in Spanish at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, where she is also Jean Sybil Dannatt Fellow in Modern and Medieval Languages and Director of Studies MML at Girton College.

Elena Martinez-Acacio serves as an Affiliated Lecturer and Fellow in Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics. She is affiliated with Downing College where she holds a Fellowship position. Her academic focus centers on Spanish and Portuguese language studies within the broader context of Modern and Medieval Languages.

Lucía Celdrán Noguera is a doctoral candidate at the University of Murcia (FPI Séneca Foundation since 2023). Thanks to this scholarship, she is developing a thesis about the adaptations of the Brontë sisters’ novels to film and television. She collaborates in teaching tasks and projects; and has shared his research in national and international conferences. Visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge.