Countdown begins for the Netflix premiere of You Are Not Alone: Fighting Against the Herd, a new documentary that reconstructs the case behind Spain’s first wave of #MeToo action. The film drops next Friday, March 1.
The center of the narrative is the sexual assault of a young woman during Pamplona’s Sanfermines in 2016 by five men who referred to themselves as La Manada. The feature follows the voices of surviving victims, with Natalia de Molina and Carolina Yuste serving as narrators and testimonies from people close to the events shared for the first time.
directed by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar, this documentary was produced by the team behind The Silence of Others, a project that earned a Goya Award, two Emmy Awards, a Peabody, and an Oscar nomination in 2019. The film has been in progress for more than three and a half years. It intertwines three key events: the Pamplona case, the attack in Pozoblanco carried out by four of the same defendants, and the Nagore’s murder from 2008. The work traces the emergence of the first Spanish-language iteration of MeToo in 2018 when a million women and young people took to the streets and social networks, shouting the slogan I believe you and spreading the hashtag Cuéntalo. You Are Not Alone: The Fight Against La Manada gradually exposes the cracks in machismo within justice, media, and society, aiming to illuminate the daily violence some women endure and the shared responsibility to address it. This is presented as a universal problem.
“The goal was to tell this story from a perspective that had not been fully explored before, while staying faithful to the judicial framework that supports the victims’ testimony. Using words drawn from court statements, interviews, and letters, and with unprecedented access to people close to the events, the filmmakers aimed to tell this story with care, empathy, and respect,” explains the documentary team.
Robert Bahar, co-director of the project, adds that the film features more than sixty hours of in-depth interviews, about fifty hours of original footage, and nearly a thousand hours of archival material. The material is woven with a cinematic sensibility to explore legal processes, media coverage, and the lived experiences of documentary participants. Expert commentary on gender violence also played a crucial role in shaping the narrative.
The documentary embodies a rigorous investigative approach paired with an artistic and cinematic tone. The musical score for the film is a significant and intricate creative element. Carracedo and Bahar have enlisted Leo Heiblum and Jacobo Lieberman, composers who contributed to their prior work The Silence of Others, a collaboration that earned four Ariel prizes in Mexico, marking their return to the project for a second time.