If Michael Haneke dedicated one of his suffocating films to the Dolores Vázquez case (starring Isabelle Huppert), the Austrian / German master of bad vibes would not be able to express even a tenth of the anguish that the real Dolores transmits in a single shot. To speak of coldness, as so many brayed in the infamous days when the Spanish media, police and justice went down the toilet together, would be to defame her. Dolores is not cold, just serene, and expresses her truth from the only place where it can be enunciated: that remote country in which she lives in exile, and I do not mean the United Kingdom.
In the documentary, which Toñi Moreno has produced for HBO Max, I have almost everything that is not the voice and face of Dolores Vázquez. The rest is noise. “People never want to see the truth, only the morbid,” says Vázquez in the second episode, and the producers seem to agree with him, because they do not believe that their bare truth alone is enough to interest the viewer, who is distracted by contexts unnecessary and deaf old hatreds. Fortunately, Dolores’s truth is so powerful that it is imposed even on narrative resources that try to trivialize and explain it.
It is good for Spain to be ashamed once again at the irreparable pain of this serene and serious woman, although the jurors, jurists, policemen and journalists who destroyed her never suffered the consequences of her infamies. I wish facing his testimony was a silent way of asking for a forgiveness that is already more than granted, but we will settle for remembering that two or three well-primed hateful prejudices are enough to break all the institutional guarantees of the rule of law and transform a democratic, complex and plural society in a rabid pack. It should never be forgotten.
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