José Luis Guerin: "The warmth of normal life no longer exists in downtown Barcelona."

Special Envoy to San SebastiánTwenty-four years afterUnder construction, one of the most important and influential films of Catalan cinema of this century, José Luis Guerin (Barcelona, ​​1960) returns to film the urban and social transformations of the city where he was born and no longer lives (he moved to France last decade). He shows them in the documentary Stories from the Good Valley, which is nominated for the Golden Shell at the San Sebastian Film Festival. The filmmaker observes the Barcelona neighborhood of Vallbona, paying attention to what makes it unique: its isolation from the city (due to the highway and the C-17), the survival of an agricultural culture, and, above all, its residents, whose diversity is evident in the dozen languages speakable in the film: Arabic, Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Hindi. He films their celebrations and almost immerses himself in the Rec Comtal to show the beauty and dignity of a neighborhood and its people in his best film since, precisely, Under construction.

Why Vallbona?

— It came to me. The film was born from the commission given to me by the art curator. Jorge Ribalta for a project on disadvantaged neighborhoods at the MACBAI got Vallbona, I didn't choose it. But Under construction It was also a commission. I don't care if a film originates from me or is a commission; the only thing that matters to me is the way you can appropriate the material with your own eyes. And in Vallbona, I felt that, in such a small, humble, and unknown neighborhood, the great conflicts of today's world were being played out: the struggle between the rural world and the capitalist city, real estate speculation, migration, the climate crisis... And as a filmmaker, I'm always interested in starting from a very small, very local reality to find it.

The documentary's subjects display great confidence in the camera. How long were you filming them?

— Two and a half years. The film is a long-term project. My method alternates between the shooting and editing phases. This is where my narrative emerges, because during editing, I become aware of the value of a phrase or a pause, and this inspires me to develop it in the next shoot. These are solutions that you would never think of in a script; reality itself gives them to you. And through this method, a close relationship is created with the people you're filming, who give you insights that would be completely inaccessible to a television station rushing to capture something from that place.

One of the neighbors suggested filming a western in Vallbona. And, in fact, the documentary has a lot of western, from the idea of the border between civilization and wildlife to the constant presence of the train, one of the classic motifs of the genre.

— It's funny, because the only film that has been partially shot in Vallbona, as far as I know, is very different from mine, at the antipodes, but which also has this element of western: Little Indian, by Marc Recha. In this space, the arrival of civilization is embodied by the construction of the high-speed train, which will transform their way of life, as well as the collision between the clandestine and spontaneous self-built houses and the new apartment blocks. It's a neighborhood that is reformulating its memory, that loses one memory and generates another. I thought a lot about the idea of western twilight, where one thing ends and another begins. Because let's not forget that Vallbona is a neighborhood of Barcelona, ​​even though the residents of Vallbona themselves say "I'm going to Barcelona" when they go to the city center, as if they weren't part of it. In fact, when you arrive in Barcelona by road, the Welcome to Barcelona sign is posted after you've already passed Vallbona, as if they were ashamed.

The twilight gaze was already in Under construction, which was a requiem for Chinatown as it had existed during the 20th century. Stories from the Good Valley It is also, in a certain sense, a funeral eulogy for a way of life in Vallbona that the residents themselves perceive as lost.

— Yes. The most common refrain from the residents during the casting was that we were too late, that a film about Vallbona couldn't be made because everything had already happened. For many residents, the history of Vallbona was that of the first clandestine constructions of small houses and, above all, the tremendous struggles to obtain sewage, electricity, and basic services that everyone has in the city, but not in the outskirts. But I wanted to film the present, because cinema is, for me, a tool above all for the present, which reproduces what you have in front of you. But to film the present, allowing the sediments of the past to be intuited, and for them to point to a future time. To make historical time coexist with another, no less important, biological time, that of crops, plants, and seasons. And the editing challenge was how to convert this diversity of time into a single cinematic time.

This movie and Under construction He is credited as one of the great cinematic chroniclers of Barcelona's transformations. However, he left the city a few years ago and now lives in France.

— Yes, but I've always understood cinema as a journey. The greatest virtue of a traveler, more than that of a tourist, is that you're more sensitive to every detail you observe. The daily grind of crossing your street can make you miss it, but when you return from a long trip, you rediscover it. During the last few years I lived in Barcelona, I grew bored with the city center and always wandered away: I took the metro, the red line, usually to the outskirts of the city, to neighborhoods where I could recognize a natural everyday life. The warmth of normal life no longer exists in the center of Barcelona.

In 2012 he already spoke of this centripetal movement of his towards the periphery of the city.

— It's happened to many Barcelona residents. But I discovered the outskirts of Barcelona thanks to cinema. When I was a kid in the 1970s, movies premiered in the big movie theaters in the city center, where they were more expensive and, if you were a minor, you weren't allowed in. To catch them later, there were rerun theaters in the neighborhoods. And I, a kid from the Eixample district, remember taking a bus and making connections to see a movie at the Dante cinema in Horta. And thanks to that, I discovered the city. Sometimes it was a shock, because of the confrontation between the glamour you saw on the screen and the harsh reality when you went out into the street. The country we had in the 1970s, with so many shortcomings, has changed a lot. We always curse the city, but life in the neighborhoods has improved a lot: the quality of the libraries, community centers, parks... Vallbona is an exceptional case because it's very isolated.

One of the final dedications of the film is in the Colombian filmmaker Luis OspinaHis criticism of the pornomisery with which some filmmakers film disadvantaged realities seems a guiding principle ofStories from the Good Valley.

— I hadn't thought about it at all. The people to whom the film is dedicated [Jonas Mekas also appears] are people I loved very much and with whom I had a close relationship, and who died during the making of this film. It's not so much because of the admiration they inspire in me or the debt I owe them as filmmakers, but because of the affection they had for me. If I had finished the film a little later, I would have also included Carlos Balagué, who was a very kind person who helped me with legal problems I had for nothing. There would also have been a phrase in Catalan, because dedications are in each person's own language.

In the opening credits, instead of "Directed by José Luis Guerin" it says "Work in progress: José Luis Guerin".

— I've always looked for alternatives to the corny "A film by..." or "Directed by..." sentimentality. I don't feel like I've directed anything. And I wanted to show the viewer that the film is being made and that it's not completely finished. In fact, watching the film you become aware of how it's being constructed: it begins with some observations I filmed with Super-8 at the beginning, then the interviews I did from a casting call... And as it evolves it becomes more sophisticated and changes; the film is a mutant organism. The idea, which is very typical of modern cinema, is that the film itself contains the process of its making, which is also what happens in the neighborhood, which is in work in progress, a neighborhood in search of its identity.

Last year, The 47 put the spotlight on the neighborhood struggle in Torre Baró. Stories from the Good Valley about the reality of Vallbona, also in Nou Barris.

— I had been shooting my film for a year and three months when the guys fromThe 47I started long before them. Curiously, Vallbona was part of Torre Baró; they were one neighborhood until the 1960s, when the Meridiana and the highway interchange grew and isolated Vallbona. But the struggles are similar.

How do you interpret this coincidence? Is society becoming aware of the importance of reclaiming urban peripheries?

— I don't have enough perspective to answer. There are more films about the periphery, so it seems to be part of a more general interest. On the one hand, it's a product of a reality we all live and suffer: the gentrification of urban centers, which are becoming tourist attractions and theme parks. Real life and the stories that allow us to make films are being marginalized in the peripheries. On the other hand, what's stimulating is always on the margins. The film's first title was On the sidelines, but someone made a documentary with the same title and I'm very happy, because I prefer Stories from the Good ValleyI'm also a filmmaker from the margins, from the periphery of cinema, and I think you always find the most stimulating things there. There are many difficulties and shortcomings in the peripheries, but I don't want to see them as victims, because they offer a uniqueness, ways of life and resistance that have been completely eradicated from the centers.

Since you mention the title, why Stories from the Good Valley and not Stories of Vallbona?

— In this film, there are up to 40 small characters and many stories and times; the past is very present. So, what unites it all? A geographical setting. We had to allude to the geography through which all these stories unfold. And if you say Vallbona, it's like saying Cuatro Caminos in Madrid; you don't see four roads, but a metro station. And I liked the fact that the title echoed the name of the neighborhood, but that it wasn't the name of the neighborhood.