In 2004, after a past as a war correspondent for TV3 and with several books half written, Carles Porta (Vila-sana, Lleida, 60 years old) and his production company gave cameras to 12 teenagers to record their lives.
Mirall effect
won awards around the world.
And he anticipated the streak of dystopias that would invade series and novels.
Then he went bankrupt to produce
Mecanoscrit del segon origin
, the novel by Manuel de Pedrolo that Bigas Luna was supposed to direct, and which he ended up filming when the director of
Jamón, jamón
died one day before filming began.
He tells it in an apartment in the center of Girona, where he has set up his production company next to the Ter river.
He explains that he doesn't have a dishwasher because he likes the time that washing dishes gives him.
He also that he goes to the market.
Although, since the TV3
Poland
comedy show turned him into a character, he has a hard time because they recognize him.
“If I stop going I lose contact with the street,” he points out with that trademark Ilerda voice of his.
The director, producer, screenwriter and narrator of
Crims
(TV3) and
Light in the Darkness
(Movistar Plus+) admits that blood sells.
Also that prisons are full of errors.
Why do we kill?
Why do we love?
There are those who would only kill under extreme threat and those who kill for pleasure or lack of education.
Many don't even know why.
A crime is a global failure.
It has a person in charge, but with him the entire social chain fails.
How did you learn to look?
Observing with empathy and narrating from a distance.
To look you have to get closer.
But to tell you must distance yourself because closeness produces empathy.
How to make the experience not distorting?
Avoiding prejudging.
I learned it in Santo Domingo.
I gave my sneakers to a guide who was wearing flip-flops.
He asked: why do I want sneakers if I have freedom in my feet and you have a prison?
He was right.
It is one thing to look with your eyes and another to see what the person who did it saw.
Look with your eyes and not with experience.
Of course: prejudices, automatic thoughts... It is key to return to the moment of the events and not look from the current moment.
Books have come out that put Winston Churchill to work.
OK.
But how did he handle the tools he had?
Nobody resists a historical review because it is done based on current criteria and knowledge.
The big research errors come from prejudices.
Who sees a bruise and writes: “He was hit from…” instead of “He was probably hit from.”
That adverb keeps an open mind.
There are inductive investigations, which start from an idea and try to demonstrate it.
But the good ones are deductive: they start from the facts.
The reality is insurmountable.
But when it is manipulated, society goes to shit.
Does the press distort?
Think about the case of Rocío Wanninkhof.
Dolores Vázquez was convicted by a jury without having a single piece of evidence.
The portrait of the dark moments of our society is as often the trial as the crime.
Where does that leave the judicial system?
It is an exception for an innocent person to go to jail.
Now, when it happens, he questions everything.
It's like wearing a pristine white shirt and getting it stained.
Death sells.
We believe that talking for many hours about death will give us a greater audience.
And that is not healthy for a society.
Why did he approach death then?
Blood stains a lot, but it doesn't help tell a good case.
I don't debate.
I tell court cases.
And we don't lengthen them.
Event journalism focused on providing data is necessary because we all want to know what happened.
Why who tells it?
A motive is not always known.
The most difficult crimes to solve are those that contain an element of chance.
Why did a serial killer kill four?
What connects those dead?
The killer in the deck was difficult to find because there was no pattern or matches.
Carles Porta.Jordi Adrià
Cold-blooded
demonstrated the senselessness behind grisly crimes.
The most important thing is Truman Capote's way of telling it.
He read a brief in
The New York Times
.
For a newspaper with a worldwide circulation it was a brief, but he turned it into a universal classic.
I have read it three times.
It achieves what I want: telling the entire movie.
What makes someone want to talk?
The first case we did for the series Light in the Dark involved someone posing as a woman on the internet.
The men went to Los Monegros and robbed and beat them.
They killed one.
We managed to talk to one, Julián.
Why did he accept it?
The day we premiered the episode at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid he went up on stage and said: “I've seen myself.
“I have not felt attacked.”
He had been locked up at home for four years.
Crims
also tells the case of the Dan Air plane that crashed in Montseny in 1970.
It was almost a state crime.
It was hidden because aviation in Spain was controlled by the military.
If it had been known, the destiny of Spain as a tourist country could have been altered.
Why did you want to cover wars?
To see up close the most important news.
He worked in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda... A death in a war is epic and a murder in an apartment is psychological?
Writing local news journalism for the newspaper
Segre
taught me that one day I would talk about someone I knew.
He had to treat any crime with a clear conscience.
Then, I went to Rwanda, Haiti or Israel with TV3… That makes you see an industrialized death.
Right now, in Gaza, in Ukraine, human life is worthless.
What we call the international community is marketing writ large.
Here we get angry at a red light.
In Sarajevo, 9 out of 10 deaths were children.
You know why?
Because they were the first to lose their fear and return to the street.
One day, while talking to my three-year-old daughter, a bomb cut the connection.
I decided that I would stay at home watching her grow up.
When someone dies in war we consider it a merit.
But if a journalist dies in an accident going to the next town we don't give him credit.
Today can you see a war up close?
You can watch human dramas.
I did what I think we journalists should do: put yourself in the shoes of those who are suffering so that our leaders and decision makers are ashamed.
With what we are seeing in Gaza, are there any politicians left who can do something?
At the end of the nineties, there were large fires in Catalonia that burned 25,000 hectares.
The president of a forestry defense group, Josep Duocastella, burned 80% of his body.
I asked him how to fight fires.
He answered – and it applies to Gaza –: “When all fires start, they are small.
That's when you have to turn them off."
I try to apply it to my life.
To personal fires?
Due to overwork and my bad head I broke up my marriage.
When you look at it with perspective, you see where you went wrong.
Work has abducted me.
But if we don't do our job well, the financial reward is rotten.
It will end up hurting us.
He wrote
Tor
, translated into several languages, about the division of a mountain among 13 families.
Francino sent me to do a three-minute report for Telenotícies and I came back with a novel.
I spent three months there.
So you could do that.
I allow it to my scriptwriters, I give them time.
He hasn't abandoned that story.
I've been with her for 27 years.
It has two parts: the murder of Sansa, declared the owner of the mountain in 1995 after 100 years of discussions, and what happens to the heirs who hate each other again.
Hate is a plant that grows alone.
You don't even have to water it.
On the other hand, love must be cultivated with enormous delicacy.
If you go too far, you drown it, and if you fall short, you dry it out.
When there is a death, they call me.
That made me feel important.
But my job is not to put people in jail.
It is offering data to the viewer.
Have you felt afraid?
Never.
They threaten to defend themselves.
They want me to shut up.
But I have never felt investigating the danger that I experienced when they were shooting in Bosnia.
Analyzes famous cases: Marta del Castillo, the pharmacist from Olot, Anabel Segura, Quini...
If we looked more closely at the circumstances of our crimes, we would understand our society better and we could correct it at the source.
We must invest less in prisons and police and more in education and social assistance.
He has a company that lives off crime.
We live by telling well-told stories that, in this case, are crimes.
We remember that evil exists.
I like to think that well-informed people are less afraid.
Don't they generate social alarm?
In Spain you have a much better chance of winning the lottery than of being involved in a crime.
Is there an ethicometer?
There are lines that cannot be crossed.
Curiosity, yes.
Morbid, no.
We do not seek to lengthen a topic, we seek to bring light.
They dedicated a program to Mario Biondo…
By popular acclaim.
For me, there is no case.
It has been built on the negligence of the removal of the body and the first autopsy.
If it had been done well..., that's it.
The victim's family has the right to know the truth.
And if the truth is not based on evidence, they look for their own.
Another thing is not accepting the truth.
This happens when you are intoxicated or when, as in this case, you have not been given the correct answers.
The widow, Raquel Sánchez Silva, was a public figure…
Television is a multiplier of good and bad.
The first justifies its existence.
Multiplying the second does harm.
That's why you have to be demanding at the beginning.
But... what is more spectacular than a mother asking for justice for a son supposedly murdered by a famous woman?
There is nothing true there other than the mother's pain.
Are there people who live better in prison than outside?
There are people who did not learn as children not to steal bicycles.
He went to prison and ended up killing.
It is the same as the abuse of women: it is inherited.
Does a murderer wake up hating himself?
He's probably not happy.
In a crime there is an action against another.
A prosecutor said that the majority were resolved in a span: the one between the fly and the pocket.
As a child, were you already attracted to crimes?
I had a quiet childhood in Vila-sana, a town in Lleida with 400 inhabitants.
My family did nothing but work.
They were farmers and ranchers.
My brothers continued with pig and calf farming.
I got up many mornings at five, which is when the ground is soft, to pick onions.
Did he flee?
From the hardness of that work: the animals eat every day.
My father helped me.
He said: “Go, see the world.
The earth is not going to move.”
And that was the hereu.
And his brothers?
The three of them stayed.
The second runs the farms.
The little guy did some engineering and converts pig shit into energy.
Carles Porta is director, producer, screenwriter and narrator of 'Crims' (TV3) and 'Luz en laDarkness' (Movistar Plus+).Jordi Adrià
Have your parents seen you succeed?
Seeing your satisfaction is what makes me happiest.
That's why when I do something I don't think about the economic benefit.
It seems more important to me that my children and whoever works with me feel proud of that work.
We are successful because we are not stained with blood.
We tell crime stories.
But we talk more about life than crime.
Do we need to tell the truth?
The truth sets us free, right?
Unsolved crimes generate helplessness.
Madeleine McCann
has become a ghost.
Clear.
But to work a case we must have access to all the information.
And that one is full of lies.
It is difficult to distinguish intoxication from information.
Investigating disappearances is not our job.
The police, prosecutors and judges must do so.
Although behind those crimes there are great stories that I would like to tell.
How is it possible that murderers continue to carry their cell phones?
There are two fundamental elements in most investigations: DNA and motive.
It has been shown that leaving your cell phone at home is an indication to blame yourself.
Why have you been carrying your phone for 20 years and not that day?
That changes your behavior pattern.
The cell phone watches us.
Is there more search for the beautiful missing women?
I can't confirm it, but that possibility is saddening.
And she portrays us.
If Rosa Peral had not been such an attractive woman, would she have had such an impact?
She is a woman in love with herself.
Narcissism always hurts.
We are social animals, when you do everything just to see yourself handsome in the mirror you have a problem.
Now, if you don't trust yourself..., then you also complicate your life a lot.
Is fear a form of social control?
Definitely.
There are interests that need to instill fear.
In politics, in sports, in relationships..., it makes us vulnerable.
When a child is told: “If you don't do this, the boogeyman will come,” he should answer: “I'll call the police.”
Are there more murderers than murderers?
Yes. Men are less intelligent and we resort to violence to solve shortcomings.
Women commit more sophisticated, less bloody and more calculated crimes.
Have you come to understand any murderer?
You understand the circumstances of a person when they have seen their life or that of someone they love in danger.
I have asked myself what I would have done in her situation.
And maybe I would have done the same.
He visited Santiago Mainar 70 times in prison.
And to his sister, 200. I can understand what he did, if he did it.
But I can't approve it.
Although understanding is a way to approve... Nothing should be solved with murder.
But you have to act, as I said, when the fire is small.
How to live having killed?
It is a tremendous question.
Do we forgive or not?
Or do you forgive yourself?
I think Fago's book is one of the best I have written.
The key is not the murder, the key is the sister, Marisa Mainar.
That's why the subtitle is: If they tell you that your brother is a murderer.
She defends him.
But she also asks: “What do I do?
“Do I stop loving him?”
He is still her brother.
He is the one who tells him: don't go back to prison again.
Today Mainar could be out.
But she wants to serve the entire sentence.
Could that be a confession?
Jesus Christ allowed himself to be crucified.
That's what Amparo, his wife, said.
Why can't we understand that he pleaded guilty to keep peace in the town?
Does believing some more than others have to do with the hours dedicated to investigating cases?
There is a dangerous empathy phase.
I can empathize with Mainar, but the data raises doubts about her innocence.
I don't know if she did it or not.
I know that, if I had been a member of a popular jury, with that evidence I would not have convicted him.
What is the truth?
The judges have the power to say the official one.
How many times does it not coincide with reality?
How far can you doubt?
You always have to doubt.
Another thing is to disassemble the system.
The judiciary and the police function.
I feel calm.
Criminal justice is a guarantee.
Could we all kill?
Sure.
But a priori everyone will say no.