Reaching Pubertat
With her latest series, director, writer and actor Leticia Dolera blends complex discussions about families, sexual assault and the age of criminality, set against the backdrop of a unique Catalonian tradition. She sits down with DQ to go through Pubertat (Puberty).
According to her Instagram bio, Leticia Dolera is a director, screenwriter and actor, in that order. But it was only when she came to setting up her account – she also describes herself as a feminist and professional zombie slayer – that the multi-hyphenate had to consider whether she had a preference for any of the three roles she routinely takes on together.
“It’s interesting because the day I put it on Instagram, I had to decide the order,” she laughs, before admitting directing and acting probably, maybe, take equal top billing. “But it’s very different when I act in my own things or when I act in somebody else’s, because when I act in somebody else’s, it’s like I give permission to myself to not overthink things and just do what I’m supposed to do. It’s very relaxing.”
When Dolera directs and acts, it means she has to be in the make-up chair even earlier than usual. That means “you don’t sleep a lot,” she says. “It’s funny because since my brain goes very fast and I think a lot of things, acting and directing at the same time is the way to be.”
A prolific actor with on-screen roles stretching back almost 25 years, Dolera has written, directed and starred in projects such as film Requirements to be a Normal Person, an episode of Covid lockdown TV series En Casa (At Home) and her two-season comedy drama Vida perfecta (Perfect Life).
It’s a dynamic she has now revisited for her latest project, Pubertat (Puberty). The six-part series blends crime and family drama to explore what happens when three young boys from a small community are accused of sexually assaulting a teenage girl, who is also their best friend.
But as preparations begin for the traditional castells festival – featuring stacks of human towers – tensions become unbearable, with secrets and lies threatening to bring down the whole town.
“It poses several questions,” Dolera tells DQ. “Can a child be a sexual aggressor? And if so, whose responsibly is that – the kid, the parents, the school? Who’s going to take responsibility for something like that and how are we going to know if we can consider what happened as sexual aggression or not?
“There is an age when you start to explore [sex]. But where’s that line when the exploration process finishes and the aggression starts? And how are kids going to know where that line is if they see that we adults don’t know? We don’t know what to do with consent as adults, and we pretend that children have that clear.”
In the series, Dolera plays Júlia, the single mother of one of the boys at the centre of the alleged sexual assault. Júlia previously believed that in cases like this, you should always trust the victim. But when she discovers the accusations have been made against her son, her principles are challenged.
Then over the course of the series, “she starts to see the greys of the situation, that everything is not black and white,” Dolera says. “There’s a more difficult place, which is the grey.
“What’s interesting about the show is you see how the parents and the adults around these kids take care of the situation. We think we’re going to know what to do and we’re going to be very clear in our morals and ethics, but then once it happens to us, maybe we aren’t. It’s where the rational and the emotional come into conflict, and that’s something that always interests me, the contradictions of just being humans.”
Puberty has been a long time in the making, owing to the significant amount of research Dolera undertook to make the series as authentic as possible, particularly relating to the laws around sexual assault and the age of criminality, which is 14 in Spain (compared with 10 in England and Wales).
In fact, it was while she was editing Perfect Life S1 that Dolera started listening to stories of children and young teenagers in conflict that emerged alongside the ever-increasing proliferation of porn, a lack of sex education and the “explosion” of the #MeToo movement.
“It’s very complex,” she says. “We know that cell phones and the internet has a lot to do with that and it was something that really interested me and worried me. I do shows or movies about things I have questions about and that I see I cannot resolve by myself. Art is a good way to explore those questions and put them on the table so you can share them with the rest of the community because social questions are not to be answered in an individual way.”
The star also spent a year talking with experts who have worked with victims and the aggressors of sexual assaults, both adults and children.
“The good thing about TV opposed to movies is that TV gives you the opportunity to almost do an X-ray of society, and you can go into more detail,” she continues. “I discovered this legal issue that in Spain minors under 14 cannot be charged of anything but from 14 to 18 they can be charged as minors. So in the show, there are three kids involved and two of them are 13 and one of them is 14. It’s putting on the table why if they’re involved in the same case, the consequences are going to be very different from them. That’s one thing I discovered and added into the show.”
When she speaks to DQ, Dolera is in the middle of dubbing the Catalan-language series into Spanish ahead of its broadcast on Catalonia regional broadcaster 3Cat and streamer HBO Max Spain later this year.
In fact, the setting and language of the series is particularly specific, as Dolera wanted to centre a story around the castell festivals traditionally found in Catalonia, in north-eastern Spain. The idea of the traditional versus the modern then became a key theme, with the story exploring how society has progressed yet maintains traditions from the past.
“One day, I thought about the human towers, the castells, and I had this image I just couldn’t let it go of because suddenly I was thinking of all the ways the story had a meaning in that context,” she says. “It’s a place where you mix people from all socioeconomic classes, both sexes, and actually once they’re dressed, there are no gender issues because the clothes are the same for everyone. It’s like the castell equalises everyone.
“It’s also about people from several generations working together, and there’s no taboo in terms of touching each other – not in a sexual way – so it’s interesting because of what happens. I like that in the castells, we have to touch each other and trust each other. Situations that have something to do with aggressions or abuse are always in context of a lot of trust, and that trust sometimes is either misunderstood or broken.”
Unable to feature real human towers in the series, Dolera found a solution in blending documentary footage of real castells with VFX composites, where the different levels of the castell were filmed in a studio and then pieced together in post-production. Some of the actors featured in the drama are also real castellers. “We did that so you could see them in the series and it would give us a sense of reality,” says Dolera.
Now, as she puts the finishing touches to the series – produced by Corte y Confección de Péliculas, Distinto Films, Uri Films and AT-Prod, with Beta Film handling distribution – Dolera hopes Puberty will provoke discussions and ask people to imagine what they would do in the same situation.
“I hope they face their own contradictions and fears,” she adds. “I hope this opens a personal and collective conversation, not just about what to do with sexual education and our children but also what to do with our own grey zones.”
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
Cuando Nadie Nos Ve (When No One Sees Us): The first Spanish original series on Max, this drama explores a series of crimes in the political and cultural frontier of so-called “deep Spain,” and one of the largest US military bases abroad.
Euphoria: HBO’s hard-hitting drama about teenagers dealing with addiction, identity and trauma.
The End of the F***ing World: Channel 4’s dark comedy-drama about two troubled teens on a road trip, exploring themes of trauma, family dysfunction and self-discovery.
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tagged in: 3Cat, AT-Prod, Beta Film, Corte y Confección de Películas, Distinto Films, HBO Max Spain, Leticia Dolera, Pubertat, Puberty, Uri Films