Icíar Bollaín has a gift as a filmmaker. He knows how to stop and look. She is attentive to what is happening in the streets. These become films that anticipate social debates. When no one was talking about sexist violence, she brought it to the forefront thanks to I give you my eyes. When conciliation was a term that was not used, she approached it from this trio of spies in the surprising way Mataharis. Until decolonization, which is now making headlines, she appeared in a film as And also the rain,
With her new film, she has not anticipated any debate, but has vindicated the woman who did. Nevenka Fernández dared to denounce her harasser, the mayor of the Leonese city of Ponferrada, in 2000. Long before Me Too. Long before the last feminist revolution. That is why he was confronted with sensationalist media and a misogynistic society. Spain owed him an apology, and it came in the form of a My name is Nevenkathe film in competition for the Golden Shell in San Sebastian and premiered in cinemas next Friday 27th.
Does talking about a real, living person like Nevenka give you more pressure? Do you feel more responsible?
Yes, you want above all that when this person sees it, they feel identified with what you do. Because in addition, in cinema, there are a thousand moments where you can go to one place or another and everything is very subtle, but that’s also why we talk a lot with her. Throughout our research and our discussions with different people, we come back to it constantly.
Writing the script therefore required some journalistic research.
Yes, because we went there, we also spoke with journalists, especially from Ponferrada, and it was very interesting because they told us a little about the panorama of the year 2000. We were there and we spoke with many people who gave us different points of view. The agents of the City Council who worked with her have a different point of view from that of her friends, different from what a mason who saw them at night, at a party tells us.
Was it essential that she agreed with what was being said?
She is a very intelligent woman. There were uncomfortable things in the film, but she also understood that it had to be told. For example, her parents don’t understand it at first, although later in the trial they supported her, but we weren’t going to sugarcoat it. There are sentences that were said very harshly, and we could have chosen not to say them. She was very alone, she had no one to turn to. What we tried to do was understand why all this happened, and it happened because they were part of this society in which the mayor was a figure of respect. We are a generation that was told that this couldn’t happen to a mayor. And we tried to reflect that. Also, things that are considered bad and good are not very interesting, because reality is always more complex.
In this research, what surprised you the most?
I was very surprised by Nevenka’s figure because of what she conveyed to me. Nevenka is a very sweet, very intelligent woman. She is nothing like the somewhat suspicious girl who communicated at the time. She gave the image of being ambitious, that she had provoked him herself, that she had established a relationship with him and that she was too young to occupy this position. At that time, she was at Arthur Andersen, in Madrid. It was an offer from them, she had options. She is not a girl who had this goal, and then there is a very intense courtship on his part to establish a relationship with her. So you think, what was communicated? All the suspicions were directed at her, not at him.
We always ask the victim to do something and I think we have to ask the environment to do something. And of course man, of course
Iciar Bollain
— Director
20 years have passed, but watching the film, I think it’s a film that of course talks about that moment, but unfortunately it talks about the present, has it improved a lot during this period?
At first, I didn’t think it would happen so much. I wanted to tell the film as best as possible. Do it well. Don’t get the casting wrong, the subtleties wrong. That was already a lot. But when I finished it, I said, come on, if this is a reflection on today. Because when you look back, 20 years ago, you ask yourself: what would happen now? How would we react to similar cases? I think we’ve changed a little bit, but I think it’s still there.
There is something key in the film, the complicit silence. A silence that is part of the breeding ground of rape culture.
It had to be there. One of the things that interested me the most was to think that this workplace harassment happens in plain sight. The aggressor and the harasser are surrounded by silence. First, because it normalizes it, it minimizes it. It seems to be accepted, and then the victim finds themselves even more alone. This is one of the things that still needs to change and that we can change. We can all react to harassment or bullying. Bullies do it because they can, because we let them.
There is an individual responsibility that then becomes collective, but it seems that we do not want to assume that we must act.
When you see in the film everyone looking away, it makes you feel uncomfortable. It makes me feel uncomfortable because I have witnessed bullying and I don’t know what to do. I know it’s difficult. The fact is that you always ask the victim to do something and I think you have to ask the environment to do something. And of course the man, that of course. Another thing that happened in the Nevenka case is that all the attention was on her, that she shouldn’t have gone there, that she shouldn’t have gotten involved with this man… I think the focus is always on the victim, because if the men didn’t do it, they could be repressed. It’s absurd.
Was it harder to portray him than her? It would have been very easy to show him simply as a demon, but he was a very dear person.
Part of the work in going to Ponferrada was to see how he was perceived. He is a man who enjoys a lot of respect from many people in Ponferrada. People have highlighted his interpersonal skills. He was a seducer, both for men and women. On the other hand, it is a textbook, because stalkers are usually like that, otherwise you would not see them coming, but they are usually charming people. It had to be there because it also makes the whole thing more interesting and more real.
Did you see the finished film with Nevenka?
Yeah.
How did this pass go?
Very nice, really. She came with her husband, Lucas, and some of the characters who appear in the film. With her psychoanalyst, her lawyer… I was watching her, because there were moments when she covered her eyes. The impression was very powerful and very exciting. There is a part on which everyone agreed. They lived everything with great fear, and the film has an epic part, but they did not live this epic like that. They lived everything with the feeling of being able to achieve it, because the idea of losing was devastating for Nevenka.
Do you think Nevenka was entitled to an apology as a country, as a society?
Yeah, look, I never stopped to think about it. You can apologize to her and show her a lot of affection. One way to do that is to recognize the victims as victims and treat them as victims. There’s something she said to me, and she’s said in interviews, is that those March 8ths when all those women came out to say, “Here’s your pack,” it comforts a victim. It comforts them to know that what they’ve been through is recognized. A collective apology is hard to do, but you can express the affection that they deserve.
His cinema has always been ahead of societal debates. He has spoken about sexist violence, conciliation… on this occasion it was Nevenka who was ahead of everyone.
Yes, he went ahead. And that’s actually why she was so alone. Now, with Me Too, a lot of women have said, “That happened to me too,” but it was just her. No one else has come forward and said, “That happened to me too.” In that sense, she was a pioneer. He was ahead of everything.
You mentioned Me Too. You have been in the film industry for a long time, has anything changed in that world?
I think it’s a social change. Maybe in cinema, since we’ve been more focused and cases have also come out, there’s been a reaction. Great things have been done, like the protocol that was generated to activate during filming, and that I think should be everywhere. I think that in general we’ve improved. For example, when I saw the case of Dani Alves, the protocol that was put in place worked very well. There are very simple things that I don’t know if they exist in Spain, but in the United Kingdom, where I live, in some places I’ve seen a sign in the bathroom that says in a very simple way: “Is the date going badly? Do you feel uncomfortable? Ask Karen at the bar. Then you can go to the bar and say that and they’ll understand that you’re in a situation you don’t want to be in and they’ll help you leave. No scandal. It seems simple and fantastic to me.
It is very impressive to see how the media has reacted. Are we better?
I think so in part. It is very impressive. We were a very ignorant and unfair society towards victims and there was an obvious misogyny and, above all, a trivialization. For me, the strongest seems to be what Urdaci says, who defined it in the news as an emotional fight. That is, this girl gives a press conference, trembling, saying that the mayor has been harassing her for months and you open the newspaper saying “emotional fight”. I want to believe that this has changed a lot.
