HISTORIAS DEL BUEN VALLE

Spain, France

Documentary

On the outskirts of Barcelona, Vallbona is an enclave bordered by a river, railway tracks, and a highway. Antonio, the son of Catalan workers, has been growing flowers here for nearly 90 years. He’s been joined by Makome, Norma, Tatiana, coming from everywhere … To the rhythm of music, forbidden swims, and budding romances, a poetic form of resistance emerges against the urban, social, and identity conflicts of the world.

Written & directed by: José Luis Guerin
Produced by: Javier Lafuente, Jonás Trueba, Gaëlle Jones, José Luis Guerin
Cinematography: Alicia Almiñana
Editing: José Luis Guerin
Sound: Maximiliano Martínez

Statement of the director:
When commissioned by a museum to create a project about Barcelona's underprivileged neighbourhoods, I began exploring Vallbona with the super 8 camera that had accompanied my teenage years in the seventies. Many aspects of this place, in transition between the rural and the urban world, reminded me of that decade and even earlier times.
I filmed in black and white, without sound, observing silently, but with the intuition that I was creating a unique visual memory by printing the very first “footage” of a territory that was still deprived of it. I was capturing the present with a sense of the past, as if the moment I pressed the shutter, time instantly became history.
They were referring, of course, to the epic story of the migrants who, after World War II, began populating the city's outskirts. They clandestinely built shacks at night, which would give form to the spontaneous urbanism of a neighbourhood completely untouched by any institutional planning.
This is a story that, with slight variations, was repeated in the outskirts of large Spanish cities during the years of the dictatorship: police raids, a life of secrecy, floods, and the struggles for water, electricity, sanitation, schools, transportation, and so many other basic services we take for granted in the city.
“All of this is in the past and even its protagonists are gone; there is no history left,” they would repeat. I presumed that a lack of perspective on the present prevented them from recognising a potential new narrative in the fragmented and shifting identity of the new Vallbona – up to 12 languages are featured in the film.
In any case, there was this shapeless, sprawling landscape that urgently needed to be explored. What could all these things mean: the rubble in a shantytown, a concrete pipe, pavement cracked by roots, a well, a bridge, a window, a puddle, a dividing mountain, a new housing complex, an abruptly interrupted path, a dry tree, or some sugarcane planted next to the tracks?
It was necessary to find the gazes capable of giving meaning to all of this, to see through their eyes: from the philosophies and wariness of an ancestral peasantry, from the legacy of a grandfather in his Indian village, from the drums of a Guinean river, from a somber Ukrainian forest ...
To share a fair vision, these diverse imaginations had to overlap with Vallbona's physical landscape, transforming it and shaping its constantly moving identity – an identity always under construction, a permanent work in progress.

Production:
Los Ilusos Films
https://www.losilusosfilms.com/

World Sales:
Shellac
https://shellacfilms.com/