Isabel Coixet: "Abuses leave scars, but you can rebuild yourself"

It plunged them into darkness.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
26 September 2022 Monday 01:11
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Isabel Coixet: "Abuses leave scars, but you can rebuild yourself"

It plunged them into darkness. He told them to touch each other, that it was an exercise to lose inhibitions. The girls caressed arms, legs, faces... until they ran into a beard and realized that it was the teacher.

Antonio Gómez taught at the Aula de Teatre de Lleida for 19 years. He first was a teacher. Later, manager. Two decades in which he sexually abused at least 50 minors. There may have been many more. He did not force them with violence, he seduced them, made them believe that he had fallen in love, gave them the leading roles, exercised his power as a teacher and played with the naivety of adolescents.

"It was like a sect, a cult in which Antonio made his victims feel that they were someone special," says Isabel Coixet, who has delved into those 20 years of abuse in the documentary The Yellow Roof, which has been screened outside competition in the official section of the San Sebastian Festival.

Coixet learned about the case through a journalistic investigation and was "very impressed, because these adolescents had been manipulated into believing that these types of exercises were theater, that they were a way to overcome fear and shame."

He contacted the victims "because he had to do something." "First I thought of a dramatization, but finally I decided on a documentary," says the director in a conversation with La Vanguardia. "I talked to the girls, I proposed it to them, I gave them guarantees that I would not go beyond where they wanted to go and they said yes," she adds, recalling that two of the victims felt too overwhelmed and chose to abandon the project.

Another seven have stood before Coixet's camera to remember that painful experience that "each one lived in a different way." In addition, the director turned to a documentary filmmaker who collected a lot of material from the time when the abuses occurred, interviews with Antonio Gómez on local television in Lleida, photographs of the minors when they participated in those theater courses, videos of the performances and of the classes they received. Some “very sexualized” classes, the girls remember, in which the teacher recommended them to take off their bra or explained how to masturbate a man.

During filming "there were very dramatic moments, of crying profusely, but I have not included them in the final cut, because it was not necessary, it could even have been counterproductive." The victims began to shed those tears when the Me Too movement started, they gathered through the Dones A Escena reflection space and shared their experiences. Some did not even know each other, because they had not coincided in drama classes.

After the complaint, the Prosecutor's Office took action on the matter and verified the veracity of the accusations. The abuses had existed, but they were prescribed. So Antonio Gómez did not go to trial or to jail. The Aula de Teatre de Lleida fired him. But he paid her compensation of almost 60,000 euros. "That compensation was a slap in the face, a real humiliation for a girl who only wanted an apology, an explanation that no one has given them."

Because although revealing the facts was an act of liberation, that courage had harsh consequences, in a small city "where they have had to face a social vacuum." In some cases not even his parents have believed them, "they had always known Antonio and he had established a network of silences with his seduction skills".

But something good can come out of all the bad experiences and Coixet sticks with that: "The girls are not traumatized and that is the most important thing, knowing that there are scars, but that they can rebuild you", she indicates and is hopeful that her Testimonials serve "as a tool so that something like this does not happen again, so that the students know that some things that are sold as theater classes are not theater classes and cannot be tolerated", she concludes.