Almost everyone seems to know the story of Patricia Aguilar, the young woman from Elche who disappeared in 2017 who ended up giving birth in the Peruvian jungle. She herself told it live on Spanish television. But neither was the person who spoke in the morning programs Patricia, nor what she narrated to Ana Rosa Quintana and Susanna Griso was reality. At those times, she spoke on behalf of Félix Steven Manrique, the Gnosis guru, who promised her eternal salvation. The documentary miniseries 548 days captured by a sect (which can already be seen on Disney+) seeks to “deconstruct the image” of its protagonist, say its directors Olmo Figueredo and José Ortuño, in what is the first testimony of the young woman before a camera after being released.
When she turned 18, Patricia ran away from home, leaving her family behind. After spending several weeks without hearing from her, her parents, Alberto and Rosa, received news from her. But in the messages that came to them, in which she assured that she was fine and that she did not intend to return, she did not seem herself. They felt that the girl was controlled by someone else. With the help of a family member’s private investigation, they discovered that Patricia had fled to Peru, seduced by the leader of a sect that had been manipulating her over the Internet for two years. From that moment on, the Aguilars began their own investigations between Spain and Latin America until they recovered the young woman, even when Patricia herself denied them in the media. Throughout three chapters, the directors explain that escape, the search by her family and her definitive rescue through the direct testimonies of her protagonists.
Figueredo and Ortuño, also responsible for the documentary series The State against Pablo Ibarabout the Spaniard sentenced to death in the United States, are inspired by 548 days captured by a sect in the book Thy will be done, by Vanesa Lozano, who narrates the beginning of this event. But this miniseries expands the investigation by explaining what happened in Peru and who Manrique’s other victims were. Here, the viewer does not find a sect of hundreds of people like those seen in other recent documentary series, such as Wild Wild Country (Netflix) or The oath (HBO Max). It is a much more intimate and abstract story.
To document how a girl ends up flying alone to Peru to marry a man she doesn’t know in person, the series team has had access to the complete judicial summary of the case and thousands of WhatsApp, Facebook and Messenger conversations of the protagonists, as well as videos and photographs. “One of the difficulties of this project was how to find that virtual tone, which would give the sensation that things were happening in real time,” Figueredo comments in a telematic conversation at the beginning of July.
Ortuño highlights “the enormous task of selecting the right messages to tell the story” so that later the editing and graphics of the post-production team would find a way to offer visual variety to all that ocean of connections. To find the narrative tone, they were guided by the film searching (2018), which narrates the search of a father for his missing daughter and whose plot takes place all the time through digital conversations on a computer screen.
It is the second of the chapters that focuses on the reason for what happened. “All of Spain thought that this was the story of a courageous father in search of his daughter, when in reality it is the story of several courageous families,” says Figueredo. Losing her uncle unexpectedly upended Patricia’s life as a teenager and that of the rest of her family. “It is something very common that victims of sects experience. They go through a very great moment of fragility. It helps us to remember that the profile of the people who fall into the networks of one of them is not that of people with few fingers of a brain, but on the contrary, people with high capacities”, completes Ortuño. “What we see here is a classic of this type of gurus: they create a problem for you (the imminent end of the world) at the same time that they offer you a solution (salvation). They tell you that your environment does not understand you and not only is it not going to help you, but that they are part of that problem, ”he continues.
The series highlights that 400,000 people in Spain are directly or indirectly affected by sects. “This is a complicated matter for the Police, because their victims are usually people of legal age who leave, apparently, of their own free will. Until the law penalizes coercive persuasion, the Spanish Police will be able to do little about it”, denounce the directors. The Aguilar family is in the midst of a campaign to petition for signatures to propose to Congress that it be included as a crime, in collaboration with the Sectarian Prevention and Weakness Abuse Network (RedUNE) and one of the motivations for appearing in this series is to popularize this request among citizens.
Although they interviewed psychologists and experts, in the documentary only the testimonies of those directly or indirectly affected by this case appear on the screen. The team built a dark set where the cameras are hidden from view of the interviewee. It is a technique that is often used to achieve a visual effect in which the interviewee appears to be looking the viewer in the eye, but here it was used to create a safe space with which to eliminate the initial reluctance of Patricia and her parents. “Each project has to find its own language and narrative. In this case, what we needed was to adapt to a group of people who are not used to speaking in front of the cameras and who had even had very bad experiences in front of them”, say those responsible.
This is how they subvert the codes of the true crimeFigueredo points out: “It is a genre that has something of voyeurism and to assist your nightmares in a very direct way. With this history, it was very easy to fall on the wrong side and make the family feel uncomfortable. Or tell a story that limits the age spectrum to whom it is directed. We have tried to present it as family content, so that many parents can watch it with their adolescent children and discuss the dangers that exist on the Internet”.
You can follow EL PAÍS TELEVISIÓN on Twitter or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
Receive the television newsletter
All the news from channels and platforms, with interviews, news and analysis, as well as recommendations and criticism from our journalists
SIGN UP
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
#chapters #reconstruct #days #young #Spanish #woman #captured #sect