fifteen years ago Albert Rodriguez and Rafael Cobos, with whom he worked constantly on the screenplay, began documenting the plight of prisoners in two of our country’s most iconic prisons, due to the harsh conditions of their conditions. -Barcelona Model and Carabanchel Model in Madrid- at the end of the Franco era. They amassed an endless collection of testimonies and accounts of the dreadful situations that took place there. police brutality and the downgrading of prisoners to animal status by prison authorities. Other stories passed along the way, between them, “Minimal island” and “Man with a thousand faces”and they thought this movie would never see the light of day because of the difficulty of the project.
That’s why ‘Modelo 77’ is so special for the director who opened the 70th edition of the San Sebastián Festival and could close a kind of trilogy with these two works. X-Ray of Our Country’s Society in the Transition Period to the present day, on issues involving ideology, sewers of power and the relationship of the individual with the system through oppression and the persistence of fascist structures (still part of the regime in the seventies) and now in the shadows.
“I had the feeling that this was an episode that couldn’t be told. It’s like a page fell out of a history book and completely forgotten.” To Alberto Rodriguez El Periódico de Catalunya from the group Prensa Ibérica. “In the late 1970s it seemed like there was anything to do in Spain, any future possible. There was an animalistic sense of freedom that contradicted the reality of the prisoners who lacked it. It seemed like a very powerful thing to me that they also aspire to this utopia, because they did it by fighting, claim their rightsGiven the chilling rise of the far right in Europe and the United States, this now seems to me a message to be heeded.
History
The movie spans three years and its main theme is the character Manuel. miguel herran), a young man who allegedly embezzled money and entered the Modelo prison in 1976. It will witness a series of atrocities against human dignity, it will always be the eyes of the beholder. Manuel will be humiliated, beaten, and gradually gain access to the prison microcosm at the hands of his cellmate Pino (javier gutierrez) and other prisoners who realize their rights and are willing to rebel against their filthy conditions by joining the union founded in Carabanchel, Copel.
“Choosing key events from this period was the most complex, because this is not a documentary film, we always had to express it through fiction within a coherent historical framework. I don’t consider myself a historian, I always stay more on the emotional part of the story. That’s why some episodes were so important, like the ’77 revolt, where 200 uncles agreed. cut veinss. They had the will and the energy to do it as a protest, and also so that the press could come in and the outside world could find out what was really going on there.”
Escape from the sewer
Of course, another important moment is undoubtedly escape the sewer One year after the prison of 45 prisoners. With no hope left that the situation would improve, the only option he could do was to save himself. “I didn’t want the leak to be any epic. I think it would betray the spirit of the movie. The simplest thing I’ve ever done. Actually, that escape is a kind of poetic justice for me, it also has to do with an illusion, a mirage”.
In a moment of extreme individualism, ‘Modelo 77’ is a I sing to the union, to the possibility of thinking in groups rather than just oneself. The director believes that today’s problems can only be solved in this way. “It is a hymn to the dignity of the individual, how to get out of a system made to alienate you, and how to escape through collective struggle.”