Marta Díaz

Putting sixty-year-old women to drug a sexist church brotherhood member with tampered torrijas sounds like commercial suicide in the offices of any Madrid production company. Marta Díaz by Lope Díaz was born in Ronda in 1988 and decided that this everyday absurdity would be the heart of her cinema.

At the ESCAC film school in Terrassa, she learned shot planning and editing alongside classmates obsessed with Nordic suspense and visceral horror. But she preferred to look toward her homeland.

And the gamble paid off.

Her formal debut was the short film Y otro año, perdices in 2013, selected at the Seminci and awarded the best directing prize in Medina del Campo. That same year, she co-directed the collective horror feature Los inocentes, an academic exercise in which several up-and-coming filmmakers split the footage of a teen slasher.

La rebelión de las batas de boatiné

In 2016, she directed four episodes of the TV comedy Brigada de fenómenos for Canal Sur and premiered the short film Los pestiños de mamá. That short shoot served as a technical rehearsal to calibrate the comedic tone of her first solo project for commercial theaters.

Two years later, she shot Mi querida cofradía with financial backing from the debut feature program of her former school in Catalonia. The film won the Biznaga de Plata del Público at the Málaga Film Festival in 2018, beating out productions with far bigger budgets.

Because the filmmaker from Málaga understood before anyone else that veteran actresses draw an audience that theaters overlook. Gloria Muñoz, Pepa Aniorte and Carmen Flores led a folksy farce that exposed religious bossism in the provinces without resorting to heavy-handed humor.

El salto al enredo vecinal y el césped

In 2023, she premiered her second solo feature film, Los buenos modales. She reunited part of her core cast and brought in Elena Irureta and Inma Cuesta to orchestrate an ensemble comedy about two sisters at odds over a family secret.

So the production once again relied on a meticulously structured classical theater framework, where misunderstandings and sustained silences carry more weight than visual gags.

Nobody ad-libbed a single line on set.

For her next project, she moved into period drama without leaving behind the group dynamics among women. In 2026, she premiered Pioneras. Solo querían jugar, a screenplay co-written with Zebina Guerra that tells the story of the clandestine training of Spain's first women's soccer team during the final years of Francoism.

The shoot brought together young actresses such as Sofía de Iznájar and Bruna Lucadamo with Daniel Ibáñez as the underground promoter. Filming wrapped after six weeks of shooting and 400 period extras on dirt fields in the Vallès region.