'The yellow roof': this is how a sexual predator operates

One of the most notable aspects of

Isabel Coixet's documentary about the sexual abuse that occurred for years in the Aula de Teatro de Lleida, is how she manages to make us understand the limits of sexual consent much better through her chorus of voices. and how a sexual predator operates to confuse them.

The one who was a teacher and director of the school, Antonio Gómez, is the elephant in that room with a yellow ceiling through which the terrible memories of a group of women who go back in time to talk about the abuses they suffered parade.

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"It was not my fault", the cry of some actresses who suffered abuse as girls in a theater school in Lleida

The singing voice is carried by seven of those adolescents who, now in their thirties, remember their years of fervent love for the theater... and for their teacher.

A stage group supervised by a young and supposedly attractive man who systematically bothered, violated and abused his students.

A free-range rooster who had affairs with several teachers, as well as an official girlfriend, and who little by little had achieved a position of power that no one doubted.

The testimonials are terrifying and they all start with stage exercises in which body language is confused with inappropriate touching and massages.

They are the tip of the iceberg of a case investigated by the newspaper

which occurred between 2001 and 2008, which was reported too late, in 2018, and which prescribed without any consequence for the predator.

The film explores the layers of a case that is built on the initial fascination with the teacher, how he made them feel his "chosen ones", until the excesses of a man who, through seduction and power, cornered his students verbally or physically.

The stories are terrible precisely because they reveal boundaries so well, especially when it comes to inexperienced, impressionable teenagers who are easier to seduce and intimidate.

Antonio Gómez always repeated a similar scheme of using and throwing away to end with the same effect: disgust and fear in them and a repulsive guilt in him, summed up in the phrase that he used to repeat when his harassment had already consummated: "This should not have happened”.

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Through testimonies and archival material from the school and the victims, Coixet traces a precise map of the abuse thanks to the intimacy that the film generates around a group of students who stepped forward, leaning on each other. the others.

a title that refers to how one of the victims remembers the ceiling of the room in which her teacher abused her, has something of a coven and atonement for pain in a group and on stage.

As if Coixet wanted the victims to return to the scene of the crime, that sad Aula de Teatro de Lleida, not to delve into her wound, but to finally close it.

THE YELLOW ROOF

Direction:

Isabel Coixet.

Genre:

documentary.

Spain, 2022.

Duration:

94 minutes.

Premiere: December 16.

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