It happens with movies that sometimes seem to invoke things, causing strange alignments of planets in the form of temporal coincidences that could have been written by unsubtle screenwriters. Last Tuesday the sentence that condemned the former president of the Generalitat Valenciana was known, Eduardo Zaplana, ten years in prison. On the same day, the film team Valencian presented in Madrid a film that shows the terrible 90s in the community managed by the popular politician.
In Valencian There is a ruthless portrait, but with a tone of satire, of power, of corruption, of urban planning. Of politicians who are dandies and are tacky. Not only that. Also the manipulation of public media, and the sensationalism of many other private media. Especially in cases like that of the Alcàsser girls, which placed fear at the center of the body of all girls grown up from that date on.
Its director and screenwriter, Jordi Núñez, has adapted another Jordi’s play, Casanovas, and has taken it to his own territory to tell the whole of Valencia based on the story of three journalist friends. One ends up working for a Zaplana transcript, another in an environment obsessed with the Girls of Alcàsser, and the other leaving her profession to dedicate herself to music in the midst of an outbreak of the bakalao route. In the background, the rice fields, the Valencian countryside and many nods to those who lived through that (remember María Abradelo’s Babalá).
“It is a project that from the beginning has been full of synchronicities,” the team acknowledged about that news a few days after its premiere in Spanish theaters. Regarding the decision not to use real names, but rather alter egos – Eduardo Zaplana is now called Rodrigo Zamora –, the director explains that it is “a decision that comes from the basic work.” “In the play Ricardo Zamora even spoke with a Cartagena accent and he also had a tone that was clearly Zaplana and it was very clear. The plots were also much more developed, there were more characters and everything was very documented and very anchored to reality,” he says of the point of origin.
“The three protagonists are fiction and are inspired by the moment in which I picked up the work and decided to separate myself a little more from reality, because I was not so interested in the specificity of the real characters. Whoever wants a biography should pay for it. I was more interested in the truth of the story and the stories. The universal truth behind character archetypes. The film is built on a fable code. From there, of course, there are many recognizable things about the characters, but at no point did I want to tie myself down when adapting,” he adds. “I imagine there would also be a rights issue, but I don’t know, I don’t know how things are going, but come on, Zaplana has it in me,” he concludes with humor.
Those “synchronicities” have been there from the first minute. “Filming just started the day after the regional and municipal elections, so while we were filming the government was being formed with Vox, we found out that the Department of Culture was staying, an audio came out of the president saying that now we would have to do a fellatio to those from Vox… a series of things happened all the time that we said, this seems to be fiction. Things that resonate very strongly with what we are talking about. So I think the film takes on many meanings and a lot of meaning,” recalls the director.
It also touches him personally. Jordi Núñez, like almost the entire artistic team, is Valencian, and identifies “100%” and recognizes himself in “each of the three protagonists. ”I grew up and live in a town in the epicenter of the bakalao route. I live near Alcàsser, and although I was born in ’91 and I was not directly affected by that historical moment, I have been affected by the trail it left, the trauma and all the mythology that has remained in the imagination. This allows me a certain distance to look at that time with different eyes and at the same time also from a close proximity. I think there are opportunities so that anyone, both from Valencia and outside of Valencia, can find what resonates with them. My intention was to leave space for critical reflection and at the same time also have space for enjoyment,” he emphasizes.
There is in Valencian a critical look at that time, where a collective trauma was created in an entire generation, which saw how “that fear got in and was incited against the bakalao route and the groups around it, the people were defined as a space of depravity.” “It’s better not to get close.” For this reason, we must always celebrate that there are authors who, with the perspective of time, have decided to look at and change official history. “This allows us to shed new light on these facts, and for them to be read in a new way and with a new meaning, so that we can extract some meaning and which we can also find as links of universality. There are many of those things from the past that are still present right now, others are overcome… I think a very nice dialogue is generated from there,” he remarks.
His ties to the story he has adapted run deeper. Núñez was an intern in two communication offices of political parties and has worked in regional television, which still has workers from the old Channel 9. His grandfather works in the rice fields and even appears in the film, and he has experienced those tensions between the bakalao route and the discos they planted in the middle of the rice fields. Some links that are noticeable in the affection with which he treats his characters and their relationship with that entire sociopolitical context.
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