Healing with magnets and feces: the short film nominated for the Goya that denounces pseudosciences

The first thing that appears on the screen is a sign with gold letters: “Based on real events.” It is important. In fact, it is the most important thing. And it is worth not forgetting, but it is hard to believe, because Fernando Cervera and Mariano Collantes appear next, explaining to the camera how, as a result of a joke, they began to promote fecomagnetotherapy, a method invented to cure diseases with feces and magnets. And how they believed them. This is how the short documentary nominated for the Goya begins Shit therapy, of Valencian production and directed by Javier Polo, which has a very clear message: “when you stop believing in science, you end up believing any shit.” Literally or figuratively.

It all started in 2009 “as a prank by some post-adolescents.” Fernando and Mariano, friends from the race, one day opened a website. In it, they put into the mouths of doctors Hugh Nielsen and Leslie Laurie – a mixture of the names and surnames of the protagonists, respectively, of House and Land as you can– a miracle remedy for all kinds of ailments. The triumph was unexpected. “We just wanted to have a laugh, but we started to see that people not only believed the story, but also called us to find out where to buy our shit,” Cervera remembers. They asked them for tablets, solubles, inhalers. They asked them for prologues for books. They were asked to speak at the Atocha Esoteric and Alternative Therapies Fair. There, among pseudopsychologists who claimed they could talk to dogs or flat-earthers, they gave a conference: they said that theirs was an ancient remedy, that the Argentine aborigines already covered themselves in excrement to cure diseases. They asked them to come back in the next edition. The biologist states that they never sold anything: “It began to be a sociological experiment to see how far we could go.” The experiment lasted two years, and could have lasted longer.

They stopped him for a woman. It was “the thin red line that separates joke from ignominy.” She was the one who got in touch, but the treatment was for her husband. “He explained that he had some type of mental health problem and that he exercised sexist violence against her and her children,” Cervera recalls. The woman thought that fecomagnetotherapy could succeed where everything else had failed. “She had a knot in her stomach when we thought that there would be people who could tell her that she could help her and that she could sell bottled feces,” she says.

So they explained what they had done. “What we wanted to convey is that there is not one type of person prone to believe in pseudotherapies but that we are all that person; “We all have some type of irrational thought, whether due to superstition or ignorance,” explains Cervera. The joke that got out of hand, the sociological experiment that gave them a lot to think about was told, among other forums, in a TED talk. That conference was seen by Juanjo Moscardó, promoter of the project, producer and screenwriter and, like Fernando, Valencian. “I was fascinated because they told it with a lot of humor but I thought: be careful, this is a very serious thing,” recalls the producer. What became clear to him is that all those voices that say “leave them, they don't hurt anyone” are lying. And he decided to find a director and turn those lectures and the book The art of selling shit, written by Cervera, in a short film.

Today it is a short produced by four Valencian production companies: Cosabona Films, Los Hermanos Polo, Inaudita, Wise Blue Studios. A short that has been through 40 international festivals where it has received 8 awards: the Feroz and the Berlanga, as well as nominations for the Fugaz and, now, the Goya, for example, which are awarded on February 10th in Valladolid. But, for the director of the short film, Javier Polo, the story behind a shitty therapy was first “a fantasy.” ”Our intention was to open a window to reflect that we would be doing something wrong as a society if two people invented a treatment with poop and magnets and people believed it,” he explains. The artistic decisions were clear: the story of fecomagnetotherapy was “a parody of the parody” and, as such, it had an aesthetic inspired on the screen by “a kind of teleshop full of glitter and dandruff.” No professional actors: just Fernando and Mariano giving life to Fernando and Mariano. And canned laughter, and applause, and wigs. And less magnets than poop.

But there is not only brilliance and comedy in the ten minute short film. Suddenly, the shot changes and, on a table, three characters appear. One, with a virus head: an anti-vaccine. Another looks like a penguin: a climate change denier. A third with a crushed globe on his neck: a flat earther. The anti-vaxxer drinks bleach, the penguin gets heat stroke, the flat earther crashes his rocket. Everybody dies.

“Some shit has happened to all of us at some point,” considers Juanjo Moscardó. When he tells what the short is about, he acknowledges that some wonder “how there are people who believe in those things.” “But then they tell you that what does work is iris diagnosis, or traditional Chinese medicine, those things do,” he adds. Stopping pseudosciences no longer happens, Fernando Cervera believes, by making laws, but rather by complying with those that have already been approved, such as the Health Professions Law or the Health Centers Law. Only with these regulations in hand, 15,000 pseudotherapy centers in Spain should already be closed.

Therefore, that Shit therapy winning a Goya would be, everyone agrees, a powerful message. According to the producer, Juanjo Moscardó, a call to “be critical.” A “be careful, they sneak it in on us many times.” According to the protagonist, Fernando Cervera, a warning against “magical thinking, which has run rampant.” A “demonstration that we take the fight against pseudoscience seriously.” According to the director, Javier Polo, proof that “there is another way of making documentaries that includes humor.” That laughter is, sometimes, the best way to send a message. That humor is, also in matters of health, “a very serious thing.”

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