Interior, daytime. A dimly lit room with no view of the horizon. Still, outside you can feel the Spanish countryside of the early 20th century. A mother sitting in a rocking chair holds a baby in her arms. Standing on one side is the father, and on the other is the doctor, muttering “She’s small” in the native dialect between Catalan and Valencian. “Of course?” the father replies. And it’s all said there. It is both a beginning and a statement of intent. Elsmarsnom, The long-awaited directorial debut of filmmaker Marc Ortiz Prades (46, Tarragona resident, La Senia), which will premiere this week at the Seville European Film Festival.
Director Ortiz Prades, who trained at the Catalan luxury cinema association ESCAC, chose for his film debut the historical reparations of a real-life character whose childhood was defined by spending summers at his grandmother’s house in La Pobla de Benifassa, a town of 213 people in Catalonia, an intersex person who was registered as Teresa at birth, but who may end up dying as Florencio. Castellon has a charming mountainous landscape. And the brokenness that surrounds the entire film serves as an accurate metaphor to serve history. It is an isolated enclave with one foot in Catalonia, the other in Aragon, and the other in the Valencian community. And most of its inhabitants are devoted to shepherds, speaking a dialect that sounds like Valencian to Catalans and Catalan to Valencians. “Language and landscape have the value of validating an identity,” the director explained to EL PAÍS while passing through Seville this Sunday.
When you are nowhere and everywhere at the same time, you can find similarities within those diffuse boundaries. This was the case of the native Teresa Pura Meseguer, later known as La Pastora and converted to the last Maquis of Valencia after the war. While she was a real person, she was also a very dark legend, which led to her being called a monster and “a lot of other adjectives that I don’t want to remember,” Ortiz-Prades claims. thriller disguised as biopic movie Depiction of the Civil Guard under siege.
When the filmmaker was a child in Spain in the 1980s, La Pastora had already become a myth. “Don’t be late from the mountains, La Pastora will come and pick you up.” “Sleep on, or I’ll call La Pastora.” The region’s kind of boogeyman was actually just a scapegoat — his intersexuality exploited and manipulated by Franco’s propaganda — thrust upon him for all the region’s unsolved crimes by the military coup of 1936 and the dictatorship’s stunning repression that followed, “at a time when he hardly knew how to use a weapon,” the director says.
For this story, Ortiz Prades, a trained historian, compiled oral memories that were part of the town’s daily life, removing the pronounced hatred of difference from the official narrative. “I wanted to get rid of the myths of monsters and murderers,” he said, expressing a person trapped within his own body in a polarized, desolate and cruel Spain, living in a stifling rural environment and being harassed by military forces. Indeed, the extraordinary story of La Pastora, once Teresa and finally Florencio Pra Maseguer, takes on an epic dimension when, after thirty years of living as a woman, she is forced to join the guerrillas, the Maquis of Valencia, in order to escape from the private security. He was the only survivor of his command, but was miraculously able to escape to France and start a new life as a proper human being.
But the film carefully avoids questions of identity through its characters’ secret desires and sexuality. “We wanted to deeply honor Florencio and his story, not to judge, but to understand why he’s doing what he’s doing, and that’s to survive, and little else. When the doctor says the baby is a girl and the father questions everything, it’s all said and done. You already know something is wrong and don’t explain further. I like to be strict,” says Mark Ortiz, who signed the film’s script.
This rigor is carried forward by the director, who uses a primarily naturalistic direction by choosing the original dialect as the film’s language and filming in the natural environment in which the story takes place. All this serves as a chronicle of six acts of conquest (developing from the character’s childhood, youth and adult life), the name of which the man wanted to be recognized.
Three actors bring life to life, first Teresa, then Teresotto (a name with special derogatory overtones symbolizing her adolescence and young adulthood), and finally Durruti (the “not at all casual” alias she chose to join the Maquis) and Florencio. The young Adria Nebot, the young Alex Bausa, and finally the actor Pablo Molinero brought to life the characters that “we created as a team.” “Florencio was a very multifaceted character,” the filmmaker claims, showing several real photos at the end of the film that show the evolution of his body and identity. “He doesn’t fully define himself because he doesn’t know how to define himself. He even enters the Maquis without any ideological beliefs.”
Perhaps everything will be explained in one moment in the movie. One afternoon, as he watches time pass by on a vast mountain, a fellow guerrilla lends him a dictionary and tells him, “You can find every word that exists there.” “They’re not all there because I’m not there.”
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