In November 1994, the CIS published a study that, under the name ‘Regional Stereotypes’, collected what people thought about the inhabitants of each Spanish autonomous community. That report put into words, and data, all the clichés perpetuated from generation to generation. You know, an Andalusian is “cheerful, funny, chatty and hospitable”, according to the adjectives given in the survey; while a Basque was “strong, brute, violent and (somewhat) noble.”
The rudeness of the Basque man and his few words remain a stereotype 30 years later. But there is a new generation of filmmakers who have shown, and continue to do so, that these generalizations are as wrong as they are unfair. Directors like Jon Garaño, Aitor Arregi, Jose Mari Goenaga or Asier Altuna, who have shown a sensitivity and ways of narrating that break not only with the Basque prototype, but also with that of masculinity that is usually associated with directors (men ). They have done it in titles like Loreak either Love, sensitive and delicate films. Even fragile. They do not regret it, but have made this new sensitivity their virtue.
In his films the intimate becomes political, and he does so through plots that touch his land and its history. The same thing that David Pérez Sañudo did in his excellent debut, Anne, the story of a mother who searches for her daughter in a context of expropriation of homes in an industrial area of the Basque Country where daily violence exploded in the midst of protests over the construction of what is known as Y vasca, a railway project that affected the life of many Basque families. Sañudo took that feeling from his companions and crossed it with a story where the ETA wounds were present even if they were not obvious.
The same thing happens in his second film, The last romantics, the adaptation of the novel by Txani Rodríguez – written again with Marina Parés – and which tells with exquisite sensitivity the solitary life of a woman – wonderful Miren Gaztañaga – who only finds company in calls to the Renfe customer service line and in a neighbor. But the story of this film only makes sense in that town and in Euskadi. The way they live, behind closed doors, the scars in the industrial towns that have seen their factories close, leaving everyone stranded. It is all of this that elevates his proposal and what connects it with that of all those names mentioned above.
“There is something that we really like to say, and that is that this film could happen anywhere, but it happens in Euskadi, and there is a way of behaving, a way of relating, that has to do with certain particularities in the way of communicating. , even within the same family and that are marked by the intensity of the political conflict,” says David Pérez Sañudo from the filming of his new film, butter remover. His way of narrating always seeks to ensure that “the conflict does not totalize the entire meaning of Basqueness, which is something that has tended to happen.”
For this reason he makes it clear, and it is in his film, that he likes what is called “new Basque cinema of feeling”, and he quotes Loreak either Amama as “films that in some way have allowed the territory to be looked at in a different way.” A concept you read in the book Basque cinema, a political and cultural history, by María Pilar Rodríguez and Rob Stone. A cinema in Basque, of quality, and with feelings at the center but without ignoring the peculiarities of the political and cultural context of Euskadi.
If ‘Loreak’ or ‘Amama’ didn’t exist, I think there wouldn’t be ‘The Last Romantics’. It is something that is not sought, but the collective imagination of our generation that is impregnated by them
David Pérez Sañudo
— Filmmaker
Although it is difficult for him to identify with the term, due to a matter of “modesty for feeling part of something”, he does confess that “if it did not exist, for example, Loreak either “Amama”, believes that “it would not exist The last romantics”. “It is something that is not sought, but I really see it and think about it afterwards and there is something in the collective imagination, or in the way of thinking of our generation, that is impregnated by what they have done before,” he adds.
Although the project was born as a proposal from its producers, he quickly felt linked by the post-industrial context that his family experienced. Places like Guernica, where they filmed, or Llodio, where the novel took place, “those places that at some point have been prosperous in the 80s and 90s, with a very strong industrial component, more or less stable salaries and a social activity that today does not exist, and that they have had to change and adapt to another type of way of living.”
This causes its protagonist to end up conditioned by her environment, something that has always interested the director and his co-writer, who seek those “relationships between individual and context, between the particular and the collective.” Also “everything that has to do with the dynamics and power relations in the most institutional spheres, between the employee and the head of the company.” Here she appears with those unions and their strike, the only way the protagonist connects with the collective in an individualistic and solitary society.
Places where Spanish cinema is not normally watched, something that for Pérez Sañudo has to do with a topic that is in the debate: “Where is cinema made? Who can make films?” “I think it also has a lot to do with the concerns of those who make films and those who allow a certain type of film to be made. I am referring specifically to platforms or people who work in chains. The power mechanisms of the industry. Maybe that’s why it has less space. I don’t know if I’m right, but I get the feeling that it may have something to do with that,” he says.
There is in The last romantics a vindication of the collective that its director does not hide. “It seems to me that society is more individualistic today and that affects the ways of socializing and even claiming something. I get the feeling that before, when there were 500 workers in a factory, one saw that their problems may be more similar. Now, due to the individualization and particularization of leisure, something that the mobile phone also produces, that also deteriorates the collective and directs us to something more individualistic,” he believes, although it is not enough for his protagonist, “that community does not serve him well. to serve forward, and that refers to a phrase from a philosopher, Roberto Espósito, who says that community is impossible, but it is necessary.”
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