—There is one thing that differentiates this story from the thousands of stories of sexual violence that surround us every day: what it unleashed.
It changed everything.
The story is the multiple rape that La Manada perpetrated on the first night of the Sanfermines of 2016 and the person who talks about it is Almudena Carracedo, co-director and co-producer with Robert Bahar of You
Are Not Sola: The Fight Against La Manada,
which Netflix premieres on 1 of March.
An anatomy of that sexual assault for which “there was a distorted version of history, in part due to the appearances of the defense of those now convicted [lawyer Agustín Martínez Becerra], due to media gatherings and interested leaks.”
Now, in 102 minutes of video, those who never did so speak in a mosaic that is the story of the proven facts: “The people who accompanied the victims, who lived it, and the victims themselves.”
Carracedo speaks in plural because that documentary is not only the aggression of La Manada in Pamplona.
Walk back to when José Diego Yllanes murdered Nagore Laffage in 2008;
links the other known aggression of José Ángel Prenda, Alfonso Jesús Cabezuelo, Antonio Manuel Guerrero, and Jesús Escudero, on a car trip between Torrecampo and Pozoblanco, also on May 1, 2016, and crosses that “earthquake” in the streets to which the director alludes and which represented a new political, legislative and social paradigm in matters of sexual violence in Spain.
Everything, notes the director, “with the green light of the families and in permanent contact with them.”
And with the green light from a team of experts, with three and a half years of work, 50 hours of audiovisual material, more than 1,000 hours of archival material and more than 60 hours of interviews.
From journalists or activists to the prosecutor of that trial, Elena Sarasate;
agent 455, the first to arrive at the bench where she sat after leaving the portal — “she grabbed her arm very tightly and told me not to leave her alone,” she remembers, staring at the camera —;
or Pablo de la Fuente, the Navarra Foral Police agent who spent hundreds of hours scrutinizing the cell phones of Prenda, Cabezuelo, Guerrero, Escudero and Ángel Boza — “what I do is I get into their lives, it's as if I would have traveled with them since they left Seville.
“I knew their expressions, I knew everything,” he says in front of the computer.
One of the agents who worked on the La Manada case in Pamplona at one point in the documentary.Netflix
They too, the women who in the documentary symbolize “the more than 1.3 billion people who, according to the UN, have suffered sexual violence at some point in their lives, one in three in the world,” says the director.
Laffage is through her mother, Asun Casasola.
The victim of the Pozoblanco attack spoke on the phone with Carracedo and Bahar, although with another name—Paloma—“to protect her identity,” she explained;
and also for that reason, her story is narrated by the actress Carolina Yuste.
And hers, the woman of the rape in Pamplona, sounds through Natalia de Molina, “reading her statements during the trial, the letters she sent to the media,” notes Carracedo.
But not only.
Because her voice—Lucía, in the documentary—is in all the others.
It is in that of Ana Fernández, the social worker who accompanied her to an apartment, the one who suggested calling her father and mother: “She called but she couldn't, she got blocked, she started crying, and I was the one who spoke a little. with Mother.
They had heard things, she had appeared on television, thinking: 'she will not be my daughter'... And they found out that she was her daughter."
In that of Ángel Beortegui, the commissioner of the Municipal Police of the Navarrese capital who did not want to see the video: "The judge told me: 'You watch the video and then call me.'
I saw the video, I called the judge.
He says to me, 'What do you think?', and we both came to the same conclusion: it wasn't the first time they did it."
In that of Teresa Hermida, his lawyer, when she narrates how the family found out about the first sentence, that of the Provincial Court of Navarra: “In the kitchen of her house.
The girl breaks down, the father breaks down, and the mother says: 'We can't stay like this, we have to move on.'
Or in the outbreak of the dozens of demonstrations that took place throughout the process.
In each one there is a part of that story, and Carracedo and Bahar say that “they contain at the same time a perspective of all the stories of sexual violence: how the institutions responded, how the police worked, how the defense put together a strategy based on the rape culture [”what did the complainant have to do?
Just say no.
Of course no is no, but for it to be no, you have to say no," Martínez Becerra, their lawyer, is seen arguing in his last argument before the Supreme Court], or how the prosecutor, Elena Sarasate, dismantled it with the knowledge of how violence operates, what it produces and what consequences it has on the victims.
Also of the capacity for transformation that the social response has.
And recording all those people was, for Carracedo and Bahar, something similar to returning to 2016. It has happened to them more times, because these filmmakers have been dedicating themselves for years to producing documentaries that have to do with history and how it changes, with the commitment social.
His previous documentary,
The Silence of Others
, collected more than 40 awards internationally, including a Goya and two Emmys (including best documentary), in addition to entering the
Oscar
shortlist .
Previously,
Made in LA
, about three women in an irregular situation in sewing workshops in Los Angeles, had also won an Emmy and was screened in the US Congress.
This new job, especially for him, has meant a change.
The “learning” about sexual violence was “collective,” says the director, but “different,” for him and perhaps for other men: “I had never thought much about how I feel at eleven at night on the street alone.” , but seeing the entire process, these more than three years, we see the universality.
It makes you review your own attitudes and experiences, how you contribute to this world not being the way it is.
Something nice is that there are many men of reference, fighting.
My process during production was a little like how a movie works: it gives you an experience and after living it there is a change whereby you can no longer look at the world in the same way.”
Almudena Carracedo and Roberto Bahar, in Madrid.Samuel Sánchez
The bombardment of facts is constant throughout the entire documentary, but it has a peak: the emergence on the screen of #Cuéntalo, the movement on social networks that journalist Cristina Fallarás began with a tweet on the afternoon of April 26, 2018 , when the first sentence of the Provincial Court of Navarra was known, which condemned La Manada for abuse and not aggression.
She called on the women to tell what they had experienced.
“And it is very difficult to tell, because before telling how they raped you, you have to tell it to yourself, and telling it to yourself breaks you into pieces,” says Fallarás in the documentary.
There were 2.9 million tweets from 790,000 women in 14 days.
Voluntarily and for seven months, a team of 10 analysts from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) cleaned and classified that barrage of harassment, fear, aggression and abuse.
Carracedo and Bahar also worked with them.
And she chooses that moment as the most difficult.
The BSC gave them around 250,000 messages.
They left them at about 2,000, cataloged by where and who had committed the attack, then they had to be read all over again.
The filmmaker says that trying to select them “didn't even last 10.”
She had to leave him for a while, cry, come back: “It breaks you inside.
How can this exist?
This sexual violence against half the world, in every town on this planet every day?
It is something very difficult to understand.
#Cuéntalo plants it in front of you in a heartbreaking way.”
Remembering that movement, the documentary itself, “is to reflect on a collective level, but also on an individual level.
What is our responsibility, what do we do, how do we face this reality,” Bahar and Carracedo agree.
A reality that changed in some way almost eight years ago and that for the producer has exactly to do with the title: “You are not alone because it has happened to many of us, because you have support now by law, and you are not alone because we are here to you, and we are millions.
That's why it has a touch of hope."
A word that also appears in the last minutes of the documentary through Izaskun Gartzaron, from the Office of Attention to Victims of Crime: “This case for me leaves hope in the face of impunity, it is a triumph.
Not the sentence: let her have her life.”
The one that Pozoblanco's wife also has.
And the one that Nagore Laffage did not have because of something that the Supreme Court prosecutor Isabel Rodríguez recalled during her last intervention in the High Court for the La Manada sentence: “You cannot demand dangerously heroic attitudes from the victims.”
Telephone 016 assists victims of all sexist violence - from physical to sexual, psychological or economic -, their families and those around them 24 hours a day, every day of the year, in 53 different languages.
The number is not registered on the telephone bill, but the call must be deleted from the device.
You can also contact them by email at
016-online@igualdad.gob.es
and by WhatsApp at the number 600 000 016. Minors can contact the ANAR Foundation by calling 900 20 20 10. If it is an emergency situation, You can call 112 or the National Police (091) and Civil Guard (062) telephone numbers.
And if you cannot call, you can use the ALERTCOPS application, from which an alert signal is sent to the Police with geolocation.
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