The arrival of the far right reminds us that censorship is not a thing of the past. For many years, it was thought that this word, this vile act of banning and mutilating artistic works, belonged to the Franco regime. And even if this corresponds to part of reality, not all of it. In democracy there was also censorship, and these censorships caused the loss of works and artists fundamental to Spanish culture.
At the start of the transition, with the constitution recently approved and everyone selling freedom and goodbye to dictatorship, the documentary was censored. Dew, by Fernando Ruiz Vergara. The film, released in 1980, was the subject of a lawsuit for violation of the right to honor. Those who posted it were the family of one of the people accused in the images of being the leader of Franco’s repression in a small Andalusian town.
Because Dew It was a work which said enough is enough, which spoke of this repression, of the power of the Church, of the atrocities committed by the Franco side and many other things. Too bad it was the first work censored in Spanish democracy. The label weighed on the film itself, which can only be seen without censorship by diving into the Internet. But above all to its author. How is it possible that Ruiz Vergara is not known?
The filmmaker was never able to put together another film and he put together a box of dream projects that only existed in his writings and in his mind. And this is where Concha Barquero and Alejandro Alvarado come in, filmmakers and researchers from Malaga who intend to revalorize their figure with another film. The simplest and even didactic thing would have been to make it a regular one telling the importance of Dew, but they accomplish a fine exercise and even justice. To somehow resurrect his mind to see what the films he didn’t make were like.
They do it in Resistance boxthe documentary they presented to Seminci. For Concha Barquero, this weight of censorship has in some way delayed the author, and this is where this interest in doing something about Ruiz Vergara comes from. They began to investigate the “film production process” and went to meet the filmmaker himself, who lived in Portugal, where he relapsed and ended up experiencing the Carnation Revolution.
“We found Fernando in a Portuguese village, over there, on the border with Cáceres,” remembers Alejandro Alvarado, who defines it as “a pretty bright encounter.” “He was someone who seemed out of place and who lacked affection and empathy. He had very good friends, but he lived quite isolated. There, we began to have a more ongoing relationship with him, and he even wanted to link us to a project that he was leading, which is the mining project that appears in our film. We were in contact with him for a year and we even saw each other just a few days before his death, which is now 13 years ago,” says the filmmaker.
All these films that he was unable to shoot are losses for cultural life, for political life and for the life we share.
Concha Barquero and Alejandro Alvarado
— Filmmakers
This connection meant that when he died, his friends gave them all the documents they found in his house about these unmade films. “We knew about some of the projects he told us about, but we didn’t know everything. There was everything from a sketch to a script, a project to ask for help… that’s when we had this idea to continue this thread. Another generation of Andalusian filmmakers who continue the thread of rescuing not only the figure of a forgotten filmmaker, but also this cinematic power of working with latent cinema. It seemed interesting to us to confabulate with this idea,” explains Concha Barquero.
Both agree that everything that was not filmed “are losses for cultural life, for political life and for the life that we share.” “We wanted to somehow, not generate compassion, but draw out this character a little bit. He was a very powerful guy, moving in the way he expressed himself. Without mincing words, but also very tender. Additionally, there is another theme that is very important to us in the film, and in the whole project in general, that of looking at what happens when you don’t come from a privileged context or environment. Making films after training and networking is not the same as being a working-class person,” says Barquero.
Here is another of the film’s many layers. How Ruiz Vergara also tried to revolutionize the way of making films and opt for cooperative associative structures. A horizontal and not vertical cinema. His work was not only a thematic slap in the face, but also in the sense that it could change everything. A class problem that even affected the fact that his silhouette was not remembered and studied as it should be.
“These are fundamental questions for us. Trying to make Andalusian films at that time, which was almost a utopia, and doing it with the group of Andalusian filmmakers of that generation who tried to create the cooperative, the Andalusian film team. It was a failure. This marks, and he is not part of these circles. We have been doing academic research on his character for years and when we sent the film to develop it or get financing, they almost always told us who Fernando Ruiz Vergara was,” lament the filmmakers.
Dew It is, for them, “a fundamental film which explains who we are and who we were, which addresses the question of the identity of these 40 years of democracy”. Perhaps it is for this reason, because of this question of identity, that they wanted to reconstruct that of an unknown filmmaker with an idea that is still the backbone of Caja de Resistencia, that a filmmaker is both the films he made and the ones he couldn’t make.
