A teenager comes out of the toilet at a train station in Majorca. She has just performed oral sex on a man who is at least twice her age, for around twenty euros. Her friends receive her with a mixture of concern, disbelief, distrust and suffering. One of them tells him that she doesn’t know how he can do such a thing. His response is forceful: “They did worse things to me without paying me. » The young woman is Jara, one of the protagonists of The girls at the stationthe new film by Juana Macías (The favor, we were songs)in which he looks at the sexual abuse suffered by minors placed in police custody, without the slightest trace of morbidity.
“Her response reflects that she normalized abuse. He doesn’t consider it something bad that happened to him and he doesn’t want it to happen again. It is proposed that, since this will continue, we try to get something out of it,” the director explains to this newspaper. The origin of this feature film is the gang rape of a minor under guardianship in Mallorca on Christmas Eve 2019, and how her testimony revealed what many had been hiding for years: the existence of a group that recruited girls and young women under guardianship to have sex in exchange for drugs and money.
“It shocked me,” admits the filmmaker, “especially because when you investigate, you realize that it’s a much bigger reality than it seems.” “It happens everywhere and we usually don’t pay much attention to it. Minors are even often accused of running away, bad behavior, drug and alcohol consumption; and the problem is not attacked. He is also surprised by the “lack of data”: “We cannot know how many cases there are awaiting trial, how many in each community, how many sentences. » An absence of information that he identifies as “symptomatic” of “not wanting to look too much”. “The first thing is to know the quantities and the scale of the problem, but it is not something accessible,” he criticizes.
The film depicts this situation through its three protagonists, Jara (Julieta Tobío), Álex (Salua Hadra) and Miranda (María Steelman), three adolescents who survive as best they can without ceasing to care for, love and care for each other. to accompany. Because The girls at the station It’s also a great story about their friendship.
How to get rid of “putting up with slimes”
At one point in the film, Jara explains to her friends that she doesn’t want to have money to buy a car or anything else, but rather “not have to put up with slimes.” His words, literally, are: “To the sons of bitches I meet.” » Juana Macías explains that to prevent this from happening, we must be aware of it. “The first thing is to know that there are things that should not be tolerated, that in society there is zero tolerance for certain types of attitudes and behaviors,” he emphasizes, with automatic “support” for those who experience them. : “There must be security for the victims, and this must reach the courts. This is where the law should protect us, especially minors. »
The revictimization of victims and the violence that people who suffer sexual assault can suffer are also reflected in the film. The “after” of the rape, followed by the visit to the doctor, to the police station, in the nearest environment. “We must provide resources to protect them, so that they can report,” emphasizes Macías, “the majority of sexual abuse occurs in the most well-known environment and there is much to be done.”
Finding the tone to tell it was the “most difficult” part of the feature film. “I wanted it to be uncomfortable for the viewer, but I didn’t want to go explicit or cross the line into morbidity,” he describes, “in moments of abuse, there is what needs to be there , you see what you see.” you have to see so that “you put yourself in the place and feel it, but not to recreate yourself”.
To achieve this, it was important to move away from what they had detected in the coverage of the Mallorca cases, in which they considered that there was “some blaming on the victims and very little focus on the aggressors”. The profiles of the attackers are therefore also different in the film. “I tried to make them generally normal people. Nobody carries a sign. Very often, the worst thing is that they are not recognized from the outside. People can appear wonderful, charming, good professionals, and then do these things. “I wanted them to see themselves represented, even if it was told from their point of view,” explains the director.
The attackers are of different ages, social classes and professions: “There are those who are in the toilets, those who are part of the families of minors, those who go to parties in luxury chalets where prostitutes are prostituted. minors. And also the profile close to the emotional, looking for a relationship with the victim. Working in collaboration with psychologists and police officers specializing in these cases has been essential in being able to bring together the range of men who nourish the universe of The girls at the station.
Once the script was written – with Isa Sánchez – the challenge lay in the casting. “I wanted there to be a lot of authenticity, that we see characters and not actors playing, especially in the younger people and the protagonists,” explains Macías. They searched for them in the streets, institutes, centers and social networks for several months, and throughout Spain: “It was difficult for us, we saw thousands of them.” Debutantes Julieta Tobío, Salua Hadra and María Steelman were their chosen ones.
The past and the families of the victims
The film also focuses on the protagonists’ families and businesses. Beyond the study of the specific cases of Mallorca, the director explains that they were documented from the testimonies of people who work in the guardianship centers, so that the fictional part of the story “was based on profiles and situations that repeat themselves.
For Miranda, her parents do not exist, she was abandoned, she has no relationship with them and she does not know them. Jara suffered sexual abuse in the past and has a mother who only cares for her occasionally. Álex lives with the violence of his family unit, in which his father mistreats his mother, but also her: “There are three situations that repeat themselves and that is why we decided to reflect them. “We are talking about specific cases, it was not a question of creating a theory or a pamphlet. Nor that the entire system of reception and exploitation of minors is reflected in the film. Given the complexity of the subject, it would not occur to me,” says Macías.
