The arrival of the far right has reminded us that censorship is not a thing of the past. For many years it has been thought that that word, that vile act of prohibiting and mutilating artistic works, belonged to the Franco regime. And although it does correspond to a part of reality, not all of it. In democracy there has also been censorship, and these censorships have caused the loss of works and artists that are fundamental to Spanish culture.
In the first steps of the Transition, with the constitution recently approved and everyone selling freedom and goodbye to the dictatorship, the documentary was censored Dew, by Fernando Ruiz Vergara. The film, released in 1980, faced a lawsuit for violating the right to honor. Those who put it up were the family of one of the people accused in the footage of being the leader of Franco’s repression in a small Andalusian town.
Because Dew It was a work that said enough was enough, that talked about that repression, the power of the church, the atrocities committed by the Francoist side and many other things. A shame that it became the first work censored in Spanish democracy. The label weighed on the film itself, which can only be seen uncensored by diving on the Internet. But above all to its author. How is it possible that Ruiz Vergara is not known? What happened to him?
The filmmaker was never able to put together another film, and he formed a box of dream projects that only existed in his writings and his mind. And that is where Concha Barquero and Alejandro Alvarado come in, filmmakers and researchers from Malaga who intend to vindicate their figure with another film. The simplest and even didactic thing would have been to make a customary one telling the importance of Dew, but they carry out a beautiful exercise and even justice. To somehow resurrect his spirit to see what those films he didn’t make were like.
They do it in Resistance Boxthe documentary they presented at Seminci. For Concha Barquero, this weight of censorship has somehow delayed the author, and that is where this interest in doing something about Ruiz Vergara is born. They began to investigate what “the production process of the film” had been like, and they went to meet the filmmaker himself, who lived in Portugal, where he relapsed and ended up experiencing the carnation revolution.
“We found Fernando in a Portuguese village, there on the border with Cáceres,” recalls Alejandro Alvarado, who defines it as “a fairly luminous encounter.” “He was someone who seemed out of everything and lacked affection and empathy. He had some great friends, but he lived quite isolated. There we began to have a more continuous relationship with him, and he even wanted to link us to a project that he was carrying out, which is the mine project that appears in our film. We were in contact with him for a year and we even saw each other just a few days before he died, which has now been 13 years,” says the filmmaker.
All those films that he could not shoot are losses for cultural life, for political life, and for the life we share.
Concha Barquero and Alejandro Alvarado
— Filmmakers
That bond meant that when he died, his friends gave them all the materials they found in his house about those unmade films. “We knew about some projects that he had told us about, but we didn’t know everything. There was everything from a sketch to a script, a project to ask for help… that’s when we came up with this idea of continuing this thread. Another generation of Andalusian filmmakers continuing the thread of rescuing not only the figure of a forgotten filmmaker, but also that cinematographic power of working with latent cinema. It seemed interesting to us to confabulate with that idea,” explains Concha Barquero.
Both agree that all that was not filmed “are losses for cultural life, for political life, and for the life we share.” “We wanted in some way, not to generate compassion, but to draw that character a little. He was a very powerful guy, overwhelming in his way of expressing himself. Without mincing words, but also very tender. Furthermore, there is another theme that is very important for us in the film, and in the entire project in general, which is looking at what happens when you do not come from a privileged context or environment. Making films after having had formal training and networks is not the same as if you are a person from a working class background,” says Barquero.
Here comes another of the many layers of the film. How Ruiz Vergara also tried to revolutionize the way films were made and opt for cooperative associative structures. A horizontal and not vertical cinema. His work was not only a thematic slap in the face, but also in the way it could change everything. A class issue that has even affected the fact that his figure has not been remembered and studied as it should be.
“These are fundamental questions for us. The fact of trying to make films from Andalusia at that time, which was almost a utopia, and doing it with the group of Andalusian filmmakers of that generation who tried to create the cooperative, the Andalusian film team. That was a failure. That marks, and he is not within those circles. We have been academically researching his figure for years, and when we sent the film to develop it or obtain financing, they almost always told us who Fernando Ruiz Vergara was,” the filmmakers lament.
Dew It is, for them, “a fundamental film that explains who we are and who we were, that addresses the question of the identity of these 40 years of democracy.” Perhaps for this reason, because of that question of identity, they have wanted to reconstruct that of an unknown filmmaker with an idea that is the backbone of Caja de Resistencia all the time, that a filmmaker is both the films he has made and the ones he has not been able to make.
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