“My name is no longer Pepa, but Marisol, tell that to my friends and neighbors,” a little Marisol wrote to her family, when her career skyrocketed with the premiere of A ray of light (1960), the first of a dozen films in which fiction and reality merged. The character she played on screen had that invented name, which the producer Manuel Goyanes gave her and with which he turned the blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman from Malaga into a business, into a marketing product that ended up “being the first fan phenomenon of Spain,” says Blanca Torres, the director and screenwriter of the documentary, Marisol, call me Pepa (now in theaters), in which it delves into the construction of the myth, told from the words of the artist, always using statements attributed to her over almost three decades, from the sixties until her disappearance from public life in 1985 .
From the beginning, they knew that in the documentary they could not count on Pepa Flores, that she remains consistent with the decision she made to remain anonymous, that she did not even interrupt to collect the Goya of Honor in 2021. Torres and the team of the documentary they were not able to speak with her directly while they were preparing it, but they did have the collaboration of her closest family. The actress’s sister, Vicky Flores, is one of the main testimonies throughout the footage (in which you can also see Nativel Preciado, the singer Amaia, Elvira Lindo, Cristina Almeida, the president of the Film Academy Fernando Méndez -Leite, Esperanza Aguirre…). And Blanca Torres says that Massimo [Stecchini], Pepa’s partner since the eighties, who died last October and to whom the film is dedicated, gave them the key to putting it together. “Talking with him, it became increasingly clear that we could not tell this story, that she had to be the one to tell it.”
Answers from interviews in the press, television interviews, private letters… A work of more than two years of research, reviewing the TVE archives and opening for the first time private collections and newspaper archives from other countries that Marisol spent in her phenomenon era, from Japan to Cuba, the United States or Latin America, where fans were waiting for her as in love as in Spain. “There is a very recurring image of her, in airports, arriving from her and the mass of people who receive her is spectacular everywhere,” explains Blanca Torres. This is how they managed to get Marisol to tell, in some way, her own story through phrases that she herself has said, or that are attributed to her. With the voice of a girl or an adult. From joy and innocence and from sadness, frustration and anger. Pepa Flores is the protagonist of the film and she was also the number one viewer for those who were editing this documentary. “Imagine, she imposed a lot and weighed. We had this idea of respecting Pepa’s silences, of understanding that there is a part of this story that we have told in a way, to which we have given more subtext, but that we left a little for each one to complete,” says Torres. “It seemed fundamental to us to leave it to her to decide whether she wanted to tell everything or not tell it.”
There is much in the life of Marisol and that of Pepa Flores told, known, rumored, shared. The documentary does a comprehensive review of everything. Since she was a child, raised in that corrala in the Capuchinos neighborhood in Malaga, living with 56 families, without water or electricity, until she acted at the age of 10 before Franco and Goyanes discovered her, took her to Madrid, installed her in his house and There she was doing everything the producer said until the actress married his son, Carlos Goyanes. She was 20 years old, and in the wedding photos, you no longer see the happy girl, the ray of light, but a sad young woman. That marriage was the first step towards her freedom, that’s what she thought. After separating from her, she began a long process of finding herself, of recovering her identity and name that had been stolen from her. A stage that, despite everything, as her sister Vicky says of her in the film “she does not deny.” She was renamed Pepa Flores, after her union with Antonio Gades, since her retirement in Altea, they made her the cover of Interview Without his permission, he was a symbol of the Transition with his fist raised. And also criticized at that time, until the end.
During her childhood, Marisol represented the values of Franco’s Spain, but she did so from a strange place. “She seemed like a foreigner, putting her in the context of that time, she was even modern,” says the director. “She was like a Disney princess,” describes Amaia, who admits to the camera her deep admiration and inspiration and ends by saying that she was able to meet her after her Goya of Honor. But after that image of an idyllic girl and young woman, Marisol suddenly freed herself, she escaped from all that, from a dictated, directed childhood and youth. She recovered her name, searched for her identity and little by little rediscovered herself as a political woman, a communist militant, a symbol of liberation at the time of the Transition. She “she was able to get out of everything. She was able to vindicate herself, but it is one thing to be free, suddenly you have freedom, but you have to feel free, that is a process. Contradictions arise there, but we have been able to see that process and seeing her so brave is super inspiring. And then her withdrawal, who has thus renounced fame and success, which is like saying: ‘What person have you thought I am?’
All of this is what makes it a “collective myth.” You are not born a myth, others make you. Society constructs them as mirrors in which to reflect and project oneself. “Each one adapts Marisol to their life, expectations and dreams,” they say in the documentary.
“I think Marisol is part of our childhood, she crosses several generations, she is important for people of her contemporaries, for the younger ones who knew her through the reruns of her films or simply because the character has transcended and has become national mythology” , says Torres. Furthermore, in the past history of Pepa Flores we continue to find current situations. “The infantilization of women, that idea of always treating us as minors is still there today. That condescension and way of narrating us does not sound foreign to us,” Blanca Torres reflects. Her goal with her documentary is for “future generations to connect with her.” “It seems to us that Pepa is from the future and it would be wonderful if the film served to connect them.”
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