Víctor Iriarte’s Surprising Author’s Look at Stolen Babies and the Trauma of Francoism in Venice

Sometimes a single image contains a movie. For example, two women on the bank of a river. Their nails are painted red and they are sleeping. Victor Iliad knew that in these two men, still without a name, without a past, had a story. You just have to find out which one it is. The image was born four years ago and has been haunting him ever since. Around the same time, he began “a series of readings and conversations with friends about recent Spanish history and the case of stolen babies”.

Emma Stone is the sexually liberated feminist Frankenstein in Yorgos Lanthimos’ irregular ‘Poor Creatures’

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The “open wounds” of Spain’s recent history became the engines of those unsung female figures whose figures would not disappear. Both stimuli are crossed. These two people are two mothers. 1. Biological.The other is the foster mother, they are the embryos especially at nightis one of the most surprising Spanish films of the year, which started its career at the Giornate degli Autore in Venice. The faces now feature Ana Torrente and Lola Dunas, two of the most enigmatic actresses in Spanish cinema, a perfect fit for this political, original film that mixes historical tales, heist Cinema and theater in free and unclassifiable form.

According to Iliad, the curator of the San Sebastian Film Festival, the film also responds to “concerns about recent history, crime in Spain, historical memory and how the film addresses not only the subject, but the form there.” . Also something the director has to come up with”. The importance of bottoming out the form. Or how politicized the form is. That’s why he turns to the codes of Hollywood film noir or French polar cinema, adding to archival imagery and melodrama element.

A film like no other that calls into question the canonical Transition that has sold for so long. “I think, fortunately, our generation is looking back in memory, and obviously we understand our parents’ generation, and that difficult time when they signed enthusiastically, voted enthusiastically. But now, 40 years later, when you look at When it comes to these images they are also in our film as an archive and you see them from another place because a lot of things happened and now we tie it to the exact political moment in Spain and now we’re talking again What are we, what are our territorial models…”.

especially at night “It very directly claims to check for wounds.” “Baby theft cases are still in very serious legal limbo, and we see similar examples in movies. I have established this small Connection, also a bit emotional. Our movie claims that you have to rethink, but think creatively, because I think it also puts forward, in these two very different characters, they share that they are victims and try to make each other Understood. I think from there I can also claim that we have to look back at our memory, justice, reparation, and we rethink who we are,” he added.

We must review our memory, justice, reparation, we rethink who we are

For this, “film and popular cinema” is the key. Historical memory must be approached in terms of what is told and how it is told. From “shape”. “I put a lot of emphasis on the ‘how.’ There’s a line in the movie that says, ‘The only thing they can’t take away from me is my story and the way I tell it,’ and I think that’s the key.”

The two women who dyed themselves gold as a shock also have Hitchcock’s shadow, which refers to Thief Marnie. “There’s something beautiful about the gesture of film noir, which is that even though she’s dyed blond, she’s a brunette at the beginning of the film, but she’s still the same woman. We can relate something to Bolaño and Many things connected with espionage, such as international connections, mysteries, characters in one city and then another, phone calls at night… all of this is imagining very literary for me, in Viking Spain In the case of La Matas, when he wrote a lot of stories about spies with those Anagrama novels at the time,” he said of other influences on the film. The costume is also “a bit of a show act”. A “ritual, as if you dye yourself, you’re already another person”. “I think we’ve all done it a little bit. I’m going to Venice, I’m going to get my hair cut…or shave post-COVID. I think those changes are part of who we are.”

In the union of these women who help each other and seek each other, there is also a future of healing the unhealed wounds of Francoism. It could have been a movie “about enemies and revenge,” but for the Iliad their friendship was the driving force that moved everything forward, although like good film noir, “there’s always going to be a tragedy. “. Also because “history is tragic and reality is cruel”. But despite this, there is a “space for mutual understanding and dialogue” claimed in the film, which blends substance and form, offering one of the most original perspectives on Spanish historical memory.