'Good companies': the Basauri Eleven, the right to abortion and feminist activism in the Transition

2023-05-05T10:47:34.915Z

Silvia Munt remembers those post-Franco fighters not with an ambitious political story, but with an intimate fictional story concocted from the pain of intimacy

In some shocking images from

After… You cannot be left alone

(1981), a fundamental document on the Transition directed by Cecilia Bartolomé and her brother Juan José, a group of struggling women clamored at the doors of the Bilbao Courthouse for the freedom of the so-called Once de Basauri, working-class women prosecuted for having an abortion.

The clandestinity of the abortion was thus linked to the clandestinity of the images and even the trial, since in principle it was planned that it would be behind closed doors, and later the film by the Bartolomé brothers was kidnapped for two years by the UCD government.

However, despite the importance of the criminal process, carried out no less than between 1976 and 1985, the events that surrounded it and the struggle of the women, first anonymously, then with the support of figures from various professional fields, it is not It deals with events that have settled in the collective imagination of our country, especially outside the Basque Country.

So the arrival of a film like

Las buenas compañías,

the second work of fiction by the habitual actress and documentary director Silvia Munt, transcends the cinematographic fact to reach that of the social collective and that of the memory of an atrocious time in too many ways.

Perhaps for budgetary and production reasons, Munt, as director and co-writer (together with Jorge Gil Munárriz), has preferred to remember those women not with an ambitious political story that recalls the process, but with an intimate fictional story drawn from pain of the privacy of some of the people who accompanied the defendants during the process.

Their demands, the requests for amnesty, their daily lives and social activism at a time only for the brave, in which the visibility of the feminist cause was far from being accepted by a society that came from where it came from.

In a dignified approach to a dark era that was walking towards the light without yet finding it completely, unknown to the vast majority of the young generations, Munt has composed a film starring two adolescent girls from different social classes in which the themes accumulate. of a feminist nature: from the acts of public denunciation of abusers and rapists to the discovery of sexuality itself.

The awareness of a group of young people, all of them women, in a harsh and gray time, portrayed by the director with the usual photographic commonplace of sepia tones, in which a few were signified while many others looked the other way .

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“If life separated us it was accidentally / what are you going to do?

/ where will you go, like this, woman?

/ Nobody loves you anymore…”, sang Los Brincos in a mythical song from the sixties

(Nobody loves you anymore)

that acts as an explicit symbol of the film, playing twice throughout the film, and thundering with a chorus that, although it was not created for activism but for love, it is recovered by Munt as an unfortunate litany of loneliness.

Better in the more subdued and intimate sequences than in those carried out by the collective struggle, with extras and police officers who only appear sideways,

Las buenas compañías

thus recovers the fight for the right to abortion and female solidarity, thus uniting , in a more modest but also estimable way, to recent titles such as

Model 77,

revealing stories of a hidden reality for too long.