Jorge Domingo Soro is 66 years old, he lives in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat and he spends hours and hours in front of a screen with one goal: to find all the places where a street, a square, a building or an enclave of Madrid in the nearly 2,500 films listed. He has already viewed 1,200 tapes, on which he works an average of three days on each of them. He puts together a complete file with photos and reviews, as well as personal comments. His eye, trained on hundreds of feature films, is capable of detecting the smallest detail in each shot. “I do this because I can’t travel,” he explains.
He doesn’t lie. Since he started working in the banking sector in 1977, at just 17 years old, Domingo has invested part of his salary in traveling around the world, at least once a year. Alone, without a pre-established itinerary, guided solely by his real interest and his almost innate curiosity, his steps crisscross countries like Holland, Japan, the United States, the former USSR, India, New Zealand, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Ethiopia, Mexico and Syria. Next year, it will be two decades since this 66-year-old retiree will not be able to enjoy a vacation of more than four days, since he has to take care of his totally dependent mother.
In December 2014, he took early retirement. Domingo then spent four years devoting hundreds of hours of his life to watching Spanish and foreign films, probably filmed in the capital, even if it was only one scene. “I quickly understood that Madrid is an unfathomable city, closely associated with cinema. Many things that appeared in the films had now been transformed. That’s what interests me: what appears in the film and what is now there,” he comments.
scene by scene
Your working method seems effective. First of all, watch more or less quickly any film that comes into your hands at the first screening. If you notice anything that could have been filmed in Madrid, add it to the list. Right now, he’s already seen 1,200 movies and estimates he has twice that many left, so if he finishes at some point, he’ll have close to 2,500 movies. It all started with the famous 2 francs 40 pesetas, released in 2014 and directed by Carlos Iglesias. The last one will be Zorrita Martinez, directed by Vicente Escriva and released in 1975.
“What I do is use a computer to watch the film and I stop it as the locations appear. I stop the image, search for it on Google Maps and write down all the information I find on the map,” he explains. According to this movie buff, he will soon start with these feature films that begin with the letter M. For his predecessor, the L, he dedicated two years.
Domingo also created his own system, as simple and rudimentary as it is effective and necessary, for cataloging his files by district and district: “I have an Excel sheet and I write everything down there, otherwise it would be impossible to keep track of it. memory. I just have to open it and see how many and which films have been filmed in a specific area of the La Latina district,” he illustrates.
An investigation after each clue
His hobby is so honest with himself that he has no intention of using all this documentation for any purpose other than his creation. “I don’t let it be known much either. I accumulate the chips and that’s it. Yes, I would agree to it being uploaded to a public repository if anyone is interested in doing so at some point,” he says.
The newspaper library is a great ally in Domingo’s arduous task. For this, ABC stands out as the favorite, so you have subscribed to have access to it. “Yesterday I was looking for the location of a film in which a car appears hitting a curb and in the background you can see a store that says ‘Transmobel’. Well, in the newspaper archives I found an ad from 1972 for this establishment, located at number 122 Príncipe de Vergara Street, and that’s how I knew which building it was and I could see how it had been transformed,” explains this former food sector worker who refuses to use instant messaging applications on his mobile.
Its big thorn is the film Until Azaña, released during the Transition, in which José Sacristán appears. “I tried to contact him in case he remembered where this was recorded, but he didn’t answer me. There is only one place in Madrid, a school where the events take place, but there is no way to find it,” he says, somewhat saddened. Besides some films of this type, Domingo admits that there are many others that are almost impossible to obtain. It refers to those produced in the early years since the invention of cinema.
Added to all this are foreign films filmed in the capital: “Many co-productions have been filmed here. The other day I received a call Killer beetles, You tell me the title… Well, there are priceless images of Madrid,” he determines.
Find films on Russian portals
Carrying out such an undertaking requires a certain amount of malice, and Domingo knows it well. “I know it’s not the right thing to do, but it’s the only way to do it. If a film cannot be found, I try to download it from the Internet,” he says. He understands. So much so that he found a Russian portal where “they show very old Spanish films because they are fascinated by flamenco and the era of the exhibition”, in his own words. He also buys many others, although he admits that it is more out of “selfishness”. As he states, “if the film is good, the clues to the locations are much better.”
Nearly a decade and a half of devoting hours and hours to the same thing has given him an unparalleled ability to know where every scene is going. According to the note, you can “see a street in Madrid, how it is laid out, see the layout of the tile and whether it turns left or right and know which one it is.”
Domingo is aware that his hobby could disappear. “The day my mother passes away, I probably won’t need to do this anymore. I’ll leave it parked, and that’s it. It serves as a way for me to travel now, which I can’t do anymore, but if I had the freedom I once had, I would grab a backpack and go to South America, which is what I want to visit now,” he concludes.
