Laurence Dollimore
A FILM chronicling the lives of two pioneering lesbians is under the works in Spain.
It comes 117 years after Elisa and Marcela posed as a man and a woman and got married by a priest at the San Jorge church in A Coruña.
Elisa disguised herself as ‘Mario’ and the event remains the only known same-sex marrige in the history of the Spanish Catholic Church.
But it wouldn’t be long before the loved-up couple were rumbled.
They forced to spend the rest of their lives on the run from persecution across two continents.
And now their story is to be made into a film by Isabel Coixet, whose latest movie The Bookshop, with Emily Mortimer and Bill Nighy, is soon to be released in the UK.
“When I think about these two women and the courage it took for one of them to pretend to be a man, it was unbelievably brave,” Coixet told the BBC.
“I was fascinated the first time I heard about the story, which almost raised more questions than it has answers.
“We don’t know what happened to them in the end, and how did they think they would get away with it?”
