Sara (Laura Galán) is a teenager who has grown up behind the counter of her father´s butcher shop. There, surrounded by sharp knives, bloody meat and animal carcasses she feels safe from her tormentors – a trio of girls (Irene Ferreiro, Camille Aguilar and Claudia Salas) who mercilessly bully her and make fun of her weight, and her own mother (Carmen Machi) who insists she must diet to avoid the constant teasing from the other girls in town.
But everything changes when a stranger arrives in town and kidnaps her stalkers, an act that she herself witnesses. Sara knows more than she’s saying and will have to decide between talking and saving the girls, or saying nothing to protect the strange man who saved her.
Shot in a small town in Extremadura (southwest of Spain) during a torrid and suffocating summer, Piggy portrays the synergies of small towns — the quarrels between families, the inability to go unnoticed, and most of all, the castrating matriarchies in which a parallel law and justice is exercised by the female neighbors whose way of seeing the world perpetuates the stereotypes that end up giving rise to harassment.
Piggy marks the feature directorial debut of Carlota Martinez-Pereda. Pereda, who also wrote the script, released Piggy back in 2018 as a short film, only 14 minutes long and with the same totemic protagonist. Those 14 minutes of humiliation and cruelty suffered by a girl at the hands of her classmates, which earned its director a Goya Award for Best Fictional Short Film in 2019, encouraged the filmmaker to further explore the topic of adolescent vulnerability, overweight phobia, bullying, and our own fears.
In Pereda´s opinion, expressed at this year’s Sitges Fantastic Film Festival, her work “explains the harassment and violence that is so normalized and passed on from generation to generation.”  Among the sources of aesthetic references, the director mentions The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and justifies the choice of Extremadura to set the story: “I wanted to do something local and it had to be the region of La Vera, an area rarely shown in cinema.”
According to Pereda, this rural setting turns the film into “something more claustrophobic than if it were set in a city.”
The main theme in the film is certainly overweight phobia. The body of the protagonist and that of the antagonist, played by Richard Holmes who had to gain 17 kilos in four weeks, are continuously shown on screen so that the viewer understands the feelings of the main character.
During the presentation of the film at the Sitges festival, Galán recalled that “being different and not belonging to the extended canons of beauty makes you suffer a lot of ‘bullying.’ She believes that’s why “this film should be seen by everyone.”