Lucía Selva was born in Granada in 1998, studied cinematography at the Escola Superior de Cinema i Audiovisuals de Catalunya (ESCAC), where she specialized in Direction of Photography. She focuses her interest on cinematographic craftsmanship and creation of new languages and aesthetics, which have led her to work in photography, graphic design, video clips, non-fiction and video essay, attracted by experimentation with different supports, digital languages and light. Her video essay In Memoriam was selected in Filmadrid (2020) and distributed by MUBI and Filmin. Her works address the relationship between identity and space, as manifested in Who Witnessed The Temples Fall (2025), her first feature film. She has a master's degree in Creation at the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, and she is currently developing her next feature film. While doing this, she’s also working on short films and installation projects, such as a way to expand film practice and experimentation around the image.
Director's Filmography:
In Memoriam (2020) - Video essay (11 min.)
Who Witnessed The Temples Fall (2025) - Feature film
Directors' Note of Intent:
Five years ago I moved to Barcelona. The change to the big city had a great impact on me when I discovered how the big city worked, and understood the differences between a small city like Granada. From the urban organization to the difference in relationships, the rhythms imposed by the space, and the consequences of inhabiting so many people together.. However, the real discovery had nothing to do with Barcelona, but with the distancing from my city.
Along these five years I have traveled briefly and intermittently to Granada. With each lap I learned to look at the city in a different way, initially emphasizing those spaces in which I recognized myself and longed for far away. Later, the nostalgic gaze began to perceive the substantial and systematic changes that were taking place in my environment and that I suffered more dramatically due to my absences. My non-continuous experience of space had given rise to a living awareness of the alteration of the city, its aesthetics, its organization and identity, which was generating changes in the way in which citizens inhabited it, and related to the space.
The double process of homogenization of space, buildings, shops, the identity of all of them, and the destruction of the old, of the ruins, of the past, collided with the almost sickly preservation of those other ruins called monuments that seemed to summarize the identity of the people, even having suffocated so much, as to become a space of consumption. This systematic destruction of space could be seen not only in Granada, but in all our cities.
The irony that my city proposed to me in each return led me to explore the relationship between space and the identity that is forged in it, that synergy that grows in those who inhabit it. In the process, I kept thinking about the idea of the end that hovered over everything; the end of a time, of an era, a generation, a place. I wanted to make a portrait of Granada at a key moment, in which it was struggling between the survival of its last milestones or the transition towards oblivion. A farewell letter to the city, to be able to remember it forever, as I knew it.
The portrait must include everything; the spaces, the people that made up the city, my friends, my family, the legends and images that inhabited us, the famous characters of culture and the street, the conflicts that live in the city, its history, and its walls, old and new. This is how the film was filled with the people that make up Granada and the conflicts that haunt it, with non-actors and recreation of events or inspiration in real events, we try to nurture ourselves with reality and the magic of the city.
The complex history of Granada has given rise to myths and legends that are part of our culture to the point that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish where the historical fact ends and the imagination begins. All those images, that popular, oral knowledge, full of confusion and contradictory versions, was also our history and our memory, and it was being forgotten. Sometimes I thought of Granada as one of those lost or disappeared cities whose place on the map has been lost but whose memory is preserved in myths and legends. The disappearance of Granada became the founding myth of our history, and we filled the film with mythological beings.
