The first person convicted of the 11-M attacks was a minor.
Gabriel Montoya Vidal,
Baby
, was 15 years old when he met Emilio Suárez Trashorras on the streets of Avilés and 16 when he transported explosives in a backpack from Asturias to Madrid.
In just a few months, he went from smoking joints on the porch of his house with his friends to being involved in the largest jihadist attack in European territory.
Twenty years after the tragedy that claimed 193 lives, the series
See You in Another Life
(premiere on Wednesday the 6th on Disney+) tells its story and brings to the screen the testimony of the victims of that tragedy.
Alberto and Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo (
Crematorio
,
La zona
)
are the creators of this six-episode production about the Asturian plot of 11-M that draws from two fundamental sources.
The main one is the book
See You in This Life or the Next
(Planeta) that EL PAÍS journalist Manuel Jabois published in 2016 with his interview with Gabriel Montoya Vidal.
The other great source is the summary of the 11-M macro-trial that was held in 2007. One of the main concerns of the creators was how the victims would receive their proposal.
For this reason and because of the complexity of filming, the preparation of this series was kept secret.
“We did not want to reconstruct the attack, but for the victims, with what they said in the macro-trial, to be the ones to tell what happened.
We wanted them to be the first to see it and for there to be no leaks,” explains Alberto Sánchez-Cabezudo.
“We shared the same objective, which was to tell what happened and to establish the story of the events as they happened and how they were proven in a macro-trial,” adds his brother Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo.
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See You in Another Life
begins as the story of some neighborhood criminals, but thanks to various jumps in time, the viewer knows that the fate of those stray bullets will be linked to the tragedy.
The bombs of March 11, 2004 fly over the plot like an inexorable destiny towards which the characters are heading.
Jabois came to Baby's story through a contact provided to him at
El Mundo
, where he worked in 2014. He tried to interview him then, for the tenth anniversary of the attacks, but Gabriel Montoya Vidal rejected him.
Alberto Sánchez-Cabezudo, Manuel Jabois and Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo, at a time during the filming of the series. Guillermo Gumiel (Disney+)
When the journalist was already working at EL PAÍS, Baby himself contacted him.
“My fear was that the story would be exculpatory and that I would focus on a person convicted of March 11 who would say that others were to blame and whitewash him.
But that didn't happen, he was very honest,” Jabois recalls.
Regarding his story, the journalist was interested in the speed at which everything happened, “how in October 2003 he was a normal guy on a street in Avilés with a broken family and precarious conditions, and in a matter of months he ended up on a bench like the first accused of 11-M”.
The book previously had others interested in adapting it.
And the Sánchez-Cabezudos had been after him for years.
The deal that made this transformation a reality was not closed until three years ago.
Book and series share an austere and raw tone in the narrative, with a conscious distancing to avoid evaluations and moral lessons.
“How do we follow someone we know is guilty of something so terrible?
We cannot prejudge him, but we also do not want the viewer to continue empathizing with him,” reflects Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo.
To maintain balance along this line, both the script and the camera closely follow Baby to show his evolution and anticipate the future with time jumps to his interview in the future with Jabois and flashes of moments from the trial, which takes center stage in the final stretch of the series.
Pol López, as Emilio Trashorras, and Roberto Gutiérrez as Gabriel Montoya Vidal, in an image from 'See you in another life'.Diego López Calvín
“There is a very descriptive first tone of the criminal story where the character still does not know what is going to happen and we discover his universe.
Towards the middle, the series turns and he already knows that what he is transporting are explosives.
The tone becomes more serious and turns towards drama and jihadist terrorism,” continues Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo, who describes his series as a “permanent tension between the banality of life in the neighborhood and the seriousness of the consequences, a game of magnitudes between the small and the tremendous.”
This is also reflected in the length of the episodes, which are around 45 minutes when the story is lighter and are shortened to around 30 minutes when the tragedy gains weight.
It was essential for them to achieve great naturalism both in the staging and in the dialogues.
“In everything, the treatment of art, the costumes… there is work to generate a moral distance at all levels.
That has been the work of the most discussion and meditation,” says Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo.
The brothers mention French films
Les Miserables
and
A Prophet
and the
Gomorrah
series as some of the visual references for
See You in Another Life.
Pablo Remón, Daniel Remón and Roberto Martín Maiztegui were responsible for the naturalness of the dialogues, who worked on the scale that the creators designed with Guillermo Chapa, who was in charge of collecting the documentation so that everything adjusted to reality.
Because another challenge was how to fictionalize this story.
“There is one thing you have to ask yourself: could it be like this?
And yes, it could have been like that,” says Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo.
“The summary tells many things that allow us to get from one point to another, there is even a lot of dialogue.
“That allowed us to have a basis for what happened and a tone for the characters,” adds his brother Alberto.
Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo, Roberto Gutiérrez and Alberto Sánchez-Cabezudo, at a time during the filming of the series.Diego López Calvín
Another key was the cast, made up of not very recognizable faces.
The fundamental piece on which the rest was built was the protagonist.
Roberto Gutiérrez, who plays the 15 and 16 year old Baby, was found outside a McDonald's.
“We had seen 150-200 children, but Roberto appeared, with Mohican hair and tremendous nerve.
He had a very powerful look,” says Alberto Sánchez-Cabezudo.
He worked alongside a teacher for two months to, in essence, learn the profession.
The rest of the cast was built around him.
“The idea was to find a balance between a non-professional actor and professional actors,” says Alberto Sánchez-Cabezudo.
Among them, Pol López stands out as Emilio Sánchez Trashorras, the former miner with mental problems sentenced to 34,175 years in prison, a character so excessive that it seems fictional.
However, his attitudes and some of his phrases are taken from the trial summary.
They all had a
coach
to take care of their Asturian accent.
“The script was written in a very natural, very everyday way, it was very precise.
It had to sound like improvisation without being improvisation at all,” adds Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo.
“It is a series that seems not to be said, but rather to be spoken in the realm of everyday life, on the street, that was another of the great remains,” he adds.
Pol López, in an image of the recreation of the 11-M macro trial in 'See you in another life'. Guillermo Gumiel
Jabois has remained in contact with Gabriel Montoya Vidal.
“He changes his phone a lot, he was in Melilla for a while and now he is in the north of Spain.
“I spoke to him a couple of weeks ago to see how it was going and to tell him that the series does not glorify anything,” says the journalist.
Although several television networks are after Baby, he continues to live as an anonymous person.
The Sánchez-Cabezudos believe that, 20 years later, it is time to talk about such a painful moment.
“I think the victims are grateful to recover this for historical memory,” says Alberto Sánchez-Cabezudo.
“It is necessary to have a story.
That is what the victims ask for, to have a story,” concludes his brother Jorge.
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