The series that strips bare the phenomenon of sexual exploitation in Spain

Special envoy to San SebastianAccording to a 2024 study by the Ministry of Equality, at least 114,576 women engage in prostitution in Spain, a third of whom are in Catalonia, which is said to be the region with the most prostitutes in Europe. At the San Sebastián Festival, the official section presented this Friday El castillo, a Movistar+ series that seeks to explain the reality of prostitution based on the boom that occurred at the end of the last century with human trafficking for sexual exploitation when, coinciding with economic growth and the increase in immigration, Spanish pimps went from exploiting two or three women to the massive and wild importation of immigrants from poorer countries and controlling them through a debt that was increasing in a perverse way.

Created by screenwriters Isabel Peña and Eduardo Villanueva and led in its direction by Elena Martín Gimeno, El castillo divides its focus into three areas: the police, the pimps, and the victims. Omar Ayuso and Laia Marull play two agents in the unit investigating illegal immigration networks, Raúl Arévalo the pimp who pushes the association between various club owners to import new victims of sexual exploitation, and newcomer Valentina Vidal one of those girls who leave Colombia in search of opportunities. The series not only gives importance to personal stories, but above all to the functioning of a system that, as Peña says, “represents a brutal and dehumanizing paradigm shift that still resonates in today’s society”.

El castillo captures in an admirable way the disorientation of the police and the lack of adequate judicial mechanisms to prosecute these crimes, as well as the sexist prejudices that remain in state institutions. “The situation has improved since then thanks to the training of judges and police and new legislation, but human trafficking continues to exist, because as long as there is consumption there will be exploitation,” says Villanueva, who points to several causes for the high rate of prostitution in Spain: “Maybe it has to do with the overexposure of the female body with which my generation grew up, that we are a very young country democratically and it is as if we had just fallen off the turnip truck, or the excessive consumerism of 90s Spain, which built and bought houses at the same time it was consuming women”.

How to film sex without sexualizing the woman

One of the most powerful ideas in El castillo has to do with the staging of sex. Peña and Villanueva wanted few sex scenes – there are only two – and not to sexualize women's bodies, and they found a perfect ally in Elena Martín Gimeno who, after directing Creatura, had reflected a lot on the representation of sexual violence and was determined to “not generate more images of pain against women in cinema”. The solution they found was, directly, to represent the scenes without filming the woman's body. “I didn't want to limit myself to focusing on the woman's dissociated face during sex, which is already very seen – says Martín –. And I realized that what I am really interested in is knowing what the client is thinking, and I have never seen that. I can understand that in the face of pain a woman might dissociate to escape, but I don't understand him. I don't know if he is feeling desire, if he is seeing the other person, or if he is ignoring the signs. So in the series we only see him”. Martín went a step further and filmed these scenes without any actress (“I am also an actress, and I wanted to spare her the scene”, she says) and, even, to make it explicit on screen in a subtle but significant way.

Raúl Arévalo signs one of his best recent works in the skin of the pimp Suizo, a role for which he had to gain a lot of weight. “There is also makeup and some effects, but Raúl has committed a lot to the series and the character – points out Peña –. Not only did he totally change his physique, but he shaved his head and modulated his voice a lot, it is a brutal transformation”. Laia Marull also offers a very solid and contained performance; she is the police officer who empathizes most with the victims and, surrounded by ambitious colleagues, ends up occupying the moral center of the series despite having, in reality, less prominence than other characters. Peña and Villanueva initially considered whether to use her character as a reference in the police sphere, but they ended up prioritizing realism. “It was the norm that the majority of police officers were men, and men who were not used to contemplating the world of prostitution with empathy”, notes Villanueva. “And Laia brings to her character a humanity and a very specific warmth that greatly improves the character”.

The series' effort to offer a systemic version of the world of sexual exploitation –the creators cite The wire as one of the benchmarks– and a plot of greater depth and complexity than the average denotes an explicit desire to compensate for years of superficial or hyper-dramatic portrayals of prostitution in Spanish audiovisual media. Elena Martín herself acknowledges that until now she had lived “with her back to this reality” and highlights the personal importance it has had for her to “meet witnesses, police officers, survivors, and judges”. And she recalls that “human trafficking continues to happen today, and not only for the purpose of sexual exploitation, but also for labor exploitation in many sectors of our society, from the service sector to agriculture”.