With You, With You and Without Me
(Contigo, contigo y sin mí)
Amaya Villar Navascués / Spain / 2021 / 86 min
Premios Goya
Best Documentary NomineeGuadalajara International Film Festival
(d)Eternal Youth Section
Abycine Festival
Giffoni Film Festival
Rizoma Festival
Beholders; Documentary Dialogues
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Spanish with English subtitles
With Amaya Villar Navascués
Amaya revisits four love relationships that have defined her life over the past 20 years, from her first romance at 18 to her present at 38. Grappling with her desire to become a mother, she crafts an audiovisual letter to her future children, weaving together memories that trace the phases of love and the challenges of long-distance relationships, where hope meets frustration and guilt.
Blending documentary footage with expressive animation, the film seamlessly merges the real and the intimate with the creative and symbolic. While personal, Amaya’s journey also resonates broadly, offering an anthropological and political perspective on the evolving role of women in intimate relationships.
Nominated for the 2024 Goya Award, With You, With You and Without Me is a poignant exploration of love, identity, and change is a masterfully crafted work, enriched by its use of animation and personal archives, delivering a heartfelt reflection on the collisions of dreams and realities over time.
Press
“Amaya Villar Navascués, the pleasant surprise of the Goya Awards 2024.” – Carla Rogel, Forbes
“A deeply personal female gaze that vindicates the right to defend individuality, to make mistakes, to forgive oneself.” – Esther Molina, Forbes List of the 100 most creative people in Spain
“A film so meta-cinematic and original that the terms to define it are too narrow.” – Gerardo Sánchez, Madrid for Goya 2024
“A journey into the past and a letter to the future.” – Rut de las Heras Bretín, El País
“The end of love may be the beginning of cinema.” – Arturo Tena, Cine con Ñ
“It's beautiful, it's sad, it's funny, it's exciting, it's hard... It's life made cinema.” – Cinéfilo de Andar por Casa
“A liberating treatise on love.” – Alejandro Ávila, Filmand
“Amaya Villar Navascués: between film editions and emotions, an authentic journey through cinema.” – Nerea Fernández, Desarte Magazine
“An amazing journey through the four love relationships that have defined the protagonist's life.” – Genís Benavent, La Batcueva Show
“A story that touches the heart, that moves to the very depths. Told with a lot of truth, in a very personal way.” – Eva de Iscar, Directors in the Zoco
“Defining With you, with you and without me is difficult because in a certain way it boxes it in, it limits the artistic project to a label: it is a documentary about affective relationships; it is a narrative montage of real and intimate life experiences over 20 years of life; and it is also a drama about the discourses of oppression that underlie the affective and personal terrain (which is always, effectively, political) of a woman.” – Francesc Miró, Kinótiko
“An interesting and original documentary about love relationships.” – Carmelo Gimeno, Cinemagavia
“The best thing about With You, With You and Without Me is the imagination when it comes to creating the scenes, the editing itself.” – Carmelo Gimeno, Cinemagavia
About the Director
Amaya Villar Navascués is a director, screenwriter, editor, and post-producer. She is also an animator, which is why hybrid storytelling is her signature style. She was nominated for the 2024 Goya Awards with her film Contigo, contigo y sin mí, her directorial debut. Also in 2024, she was included in Forbes’ list of the 100 most creative people in Spain.
She has edited five feature films, more than 20 short films, and over 500 audiovisual pieces throughout her career. A graduate in Audiovisual Communication, she specialized in Editing and Post-production at the International Film School of Cuba (San Antonio de los Baños) and the Madrid Film Institute.
Her work as an editor has been featured at festivals such as the Berlinale (El Carro Azul, 2014) and DocumentaMadrid (Madera, 2013). Her current role as a director has taken her to festivals like the Guadalajara International Film Festival in Mexico.
Notes on Film
“Love moves our lives. Its absence destroys us. Yet, we confine it to fiction, as if in real life, in documentaries, it gives us a bit of shame to give it so much focus. Faced with that feeling, which I too had, this film breaks with containment. In the macro, it is a philosophical essay on love in couples and its stages. In the micro, it opens a great window to the freshness of intimacy, mine, to really be able to speak of a more universal one.
Hybridity is important in this film. When learning a new language, one dreams in that language; when the director is also an animation teacher, she thinks in a hybrid format. And that’s what happens in With You, With You and Without Me, where real images coexist with characters whose faces are rotoscoped and animated.
My purpose with this film is to show the evolution of a female character, myself, towards awareness and empowerment, just as it happened to me in real life. The germ of the film was the enormous feeling of guilt that the story that takes place in Cuba led me to. In a current feminist moment, where fluid relationships are gaining ground, guilt for infidelity seems like an obsolete topic, however, in a film that spans 20 years of life, that awakening becomes almost an anthropological issue, a reflection of the awakening of many women.
The central theme is the evolution of romantic relationships: the illusions with which we begin and the walls against which we collide. Split screens make past and present dialogue and evidence the clash between expectation and reality. The desire for motherhood appears transversally and is a metaphor for our own desires that we put aside in the name of others.
As a film editor, this is a film that has an enormous selection of work behind it, since it comes from 450 hours of raw material and ten years of work. And also an enormous work of animation: for every second of rotoscoping there are four hours of work. I also wanted to pay tribute to the art of editing, as the only one capable of changing the meaning of the story. In this case, I embrace the tragicomic, and with editing tricks, I create a fictitious life raft, from which it is possible to have those happy endings that paradoxically only happen in fictional films. A film in which at some point I have done almost all the positions. An artisan work made with a lot of love.”
– Amaya Villar Navascués, Director