Gabriela Ybarra and Ángeles González-Sinde premiere at the Barcelona Film Fest the adaptation of an autobiographical novel that vindicates memory and mourning. The film hits theaters on May 27.
“They say that in my family there is always one more guest at each meal. It is invisible, but it is there. It has a plate, glass and cutlery. From time to time he appears, casts his shadow on the table and erases one of those present». This is how ‘El comensal’ begins, the autobiographical novel that Gabriela Ybarra (Bilbao, 1983) published in 2015 and with which she won the Euskadi Prize for Literature the following year. In it he dealt with a double duel: the murder of his grandfather at the hands of ETA in 1977 and the death of his mother, Ernestina Pasch, due to cancer in 2011. ‘El comensal’ is also a film that will hit theaters on 27 of May. The film, presented this Saturday at the Barcelona Film Fest, marks the return of Ángeles González-Sinde to directing 14 years after ‘A word of yours’.
In the film, Javier de Ybarra, the grandfather that Gabriela did not get to know, is called Javier Arriaga. Mayor of Bilbao, president of the Biscay Provincial Council and of EL CORREO, ETA considered Javier de Ybarra the intellectual reference of Neguri. He asked for 1,000 million pesetas in his kidnapping. His lifeless body was found in the foothills of Gorbea. Iñaki Miramón gives life to this upright, religious and passionate man of Biscayan culture, who in a brilliant detail of a script co-written by González-Sinde and Ybarra when he is kidnapped leaves a plate on the table that will never receive his diner.
The film jumps fluidly from the present to the past. One death echoes another that was never mourned. Susana Abaitua (Nerea in ‘Patria’) sees how cancer takes her mother (Adriana Ozores) when her father (Ginés García Millán) still hasn’t gotten over the kidnapping and murder of the grandfather that no one talks about in the family. “You don’t know anything, daughter, I’ve already experienced this,” snaps this surly and bitter man, who has never overcome crime. ‘El comensal’ is based on that father-daughter approach in our days, while we travel to the terrible days of the kidnapping, when the brothers tried to collect 1,000 million pesetas without the bank or their friends helping them.
Few times has Spanish cinema reflected the daily trauma of two characters marked by violence. While Icíar (Susana Abaitua) thinks he sees a hooded man in the students he teaches, the father looks under the car and feels watched by the looks and banners in favor of the prisoners. “The south is calmer,” he notes. Another sharp note on the script: when ETA stops killing and the father can finally do without the escort, he barely remembers how to drive a car.
“I have a curious feeling after seeing the film,” acknowledges Gabriela Ybarra. «They are not just any characters, I and my family are supposed to be there on the screen, although we are passed through the filter of my fiction first and through the imagination of Ángeles later. I have the feeling of attending a kind of strange therapy with actors playing my life. The writer herself confesses that the first time she saw her she did not stop “crying like a cupcake” from the credits.
‘El comensal’ has been shot in Getxo, Mundaka and Bilbao, among other locations.
“You are slower than the character, she has a lot of energy,” says Ángeles González-Sinde, with a Sant Jordi rose in her lap. The transmission of memory is one of the great themes of ‘El comensal’, explains the former Minister of Culture. “It is not an easy thing to do individually as a family or socially as a country. In Spain, unlike other European countries, we do not have a social memory of violent acts, we have not ordered that disorder. And that is reflected later in the families. We have all learned to keep quiet in order to move forward and survive.
take away the pain
The clippings from EL CORREO, the secrets kept in a drawer and the broken silences of the father will gradually shape the investigation of the protagonist, who just wants to know. «A family is a laboratory in which you learn to live with those who are different from you. That side of the novel also interested me a lot”, observes Sinde. At one point, the father character tells the daughter that writing a book will be useless.
“Books serve in a way that you can’t imagine what it will be,” reflects Gabriela Ybarra. «I wouldn’t know how to explain how ‘El comensal’ has worked for me; Of course, writing a book does not heal a trauma. But it gives you one more tool to name it. I consider this book to be an enunciation: this is what happened, they killed my grandfather. We are covering up violent events all the time. Well, here it is verified in an almost notarial way ».
For her part, Ángeles González-Sinde detected in the novel a narrator who did something with her pain seeking a transformation. «People tell you that time heals everything, in my case three years have passed since I lost my partner (the editor Claudio López Lamadrid). But you are not better because that time has passed, but because there have been changes. Other times time passes and everything remains the same, as with the violence of the Civil War. A book is not going to bring the missing person or take away the terrible pain, but when you have brought about an internal change, others follow. That’s the only thing you can do with the loss.”
Ginés García Millán and Susana Abaitua in ‘El comensal’.
‘El comensal’ arrives just when, from fiction and documentary, the violence that plagued the Basque Country until the day before yesterday is reviewed. «When I start writing I never think about that battle for the story that is supposed to exist, I do it selfishly to be better. But ‘El comensal’ is accompanied by other stories, it is part of a dialogue. Because that is the way for the Basque Country, a traumatized society, to overcome that trauma. I am very excited that the book has moved readers at the opposite end of my ideology”, Gabriela Ybarra congratulates. «The murder of my grandfather is public, and that is painful because you have to share your grief. And that’s never nice.”
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