This happens with films that sometimes seem to conjure things up, causing strange alignments of planets as temporal coincidences that could have been written by unsubtle screenwriters. Last Tuesday, the sentence that sentenced the former president of the Generalitat Valenciana, Eduardo Zaplana, to ten years in prison was announced. The same day, the film crew Valencian presented in Madrid a film that shows the terrible 90s in the community led by the popular politician.
In Valencian There is a merciless portrait, but with a tone of satire, of power, of corruption, of urban planning. Dandy and nerdy politicians. Not just that. Not to mention the manipulation of public media and the sensationalism of many other private media. Especially in cases like that of the Alcàsser girls, who placed fear at the center of the body of all adult girls from that date on.
Its director and screenwriter, Jordi Núñez, adapted another play by Jordi, Casanovas, and took it to his own territory to tell the whole of Valencia from the story of three journalist friends. One ends up working for a transcription of Zaplana, another in an environment obsessed with the Daughters of Alcàsser, and the other abandons her profession to devote herself to music in the middle of the bakalao route. In the background, the rice fields, the Valencian countryside and many nods to those who experienced this (remember Babalá by María Abradelo).
“It is a project that, from the beginning, has been full of synchronicities,” the team recognized about this news a few days after its premiere in Spanish theaters. Regarding the decision not to use real names, but rather alter egos – Eduardo Zaplana is now called Rodrigo Zamora – the director explains that it is “a decision that comes from the basic work”. “In the play, Ricardo Zamora even spoke with a Cartagena accent and he also had a tone that was clearly zaplana and it was very clear. The plots were also much more developed, there were more characters and everything was very researched and very grounded in reality,” he says of the original point.
“The three protagonists are fiction and are inspired by the moment when I took over the work and decided to separate myself a little more from reality, because I was not so interested in the specificity of the real characters. Anyone who wants a biography must pay for it. I was more interested in the truth of history and stories. The universal truth behind character archetypes. The film is built on a fable code. From there, of course, there are a lot of recognizable things in the characters, but at no point did I want to get attached during the adaptation,” he adds. “I imagine there would also be a question of rights, but I don’t know, I don’t know how it happens, but come on, Zaplana has it in me,” he concludes with humor.
These “synchronicities” have been there from minute one. “Filming just started the day after the regional and municipal elections, so while we were filming the government being formed with Vox, we learned that the Ministry of Culture was staying, an audio came out of the president saying that now we would have to make a fellatio to those at Vox… there was a series of things going on all the time that we were saying, it seems to be fiction, things that resonate very strongly with what we’re talking about, so I think the film makes a lot of sense. and a lot of meaning”, recalls the director.
It also affects him personally. Jordi Núñez, like almost the entire artistic team, is Valencian, identifies “100%” and recognizes himself in “each of the three protagonists. “I grew up and live in a town located at the epicenter of the bakalao route. I live near Alcàsser and, although I was born in 1991 and was not directly affected by this historic moment, I was touched by the mark it left, the trauma and all the mythology that has remained in the imagination. This allows me to have a certain distance to look at this moment with different eyes and at the same time also very closely. I think there are opportunities for everyone, both in Valencia and outside Valencia, to find what speaks to them. My intention was to leave space for critical reflection and at the same time to leave space for pleasure,” he emphasizes.
There is in Valencian a critical look at this time, where a collective trauma was created in an entire generation, which saw how “this fear entered and was incited against the bakalao route and the groups surrounding it, people were defined as a space of depravity. “It’s better not to come close.” It is for this reason that we must always rejoice in the fact that there are authors who, in the perspective of time, have decided to look at and change the official history. “This allows us to shed new light on these facts, and to read them in a new way and with a new meaning, in order to extract meaning from them and which we can also find as links of universality. There are many things from the past that are still present today, others are overcome… I think a very beautiful dialogue ensues,” he remarks.
His connections to the story he adapted run deeper. Núñez interned in two political party communications offices and worked at regional television, which still has employees from the old Channel 9. His grandfather works in the rice fields and even appears in the film, and he experienced these tensions between the roads of the bakalao and the nightclubs that they set up in the middle of the rice fields. Links that can be seen in the affection with which he treats his characters and their relationship with this entire socio-political context.
