Salvador Calvo is passionate about adventure and has shown it with his films. If in 1898. The Last of the Philippines (2016) he went to Equatorial Guinea and in Adú (2020) he returned to explore African lands in an ambitious story of crossed stories that earned him the Goya for best director, with Valley of Shadows he is gone nothing less than to film in the Himalayas to tell a story of overcoming and redemption set in 1999.
The one that Enrique Bermejo (Miguel Herrán) has to live through, a young man who has traveled halfway around the world and is going on a spiritual trip to northern India with his partner and her young son. They are supposed to be a few days of disconnection, of seeking adventure among idyllic landscapes and of getting closer to the couple, whose relationship is not going through a good moment. She would have chosen to go to the beach, but he convinces her to visit a more exotic destination that, in the end, becomes extremely dangerous. Because one night, sleeping outdoors during a storm, they suffer a brutal attack by bandits. Quique is rescued by a native and taken to an isolated village in the mountains from which he will not be able to leave until the arrival of winter. Waiting and living together will not be easy while he waits for justice to be done.
The origin of the story comes from when Calvo wanted to visit India in the year 2000. "I started reading travel books and in almost all the guides an area of the Himalayas appeared that was known as the 'Bermuda Triangle of India' with a lot of missing foreigners, especially young people. It was something that bothered me. I went to India but I didn't visit that area and I was left with the story of that. Later, I read in Spanish newspapers the case of a girl Valencian woman who traveled with her son and her boyfriend and only he survived," the director tells La Vanguardia, who later discovered other real stories that ultimately led to a fiction about a person "corroded by guilt and that journey of redemption , to forgive oneself without forgetting what has happened, because something like that is impossible to forget.
The film, nominated for three Goya awards – production direction, makeup and special effects – was shot over seven weeks in very complex conditions and on a low budget. "Valley of Shadows is a film that could be indie, but in reality it is guerrilla. We were going with the right thing," confesses Calvo. "It has some adventure, a thriller, but in the end it is a personal drama about how you digest guilt."
The film begins with some phrases taken from the 1999 Lonely Planet guide that warns about the disappearance in the Kullu Valley of a dozen tourists between 1996 and 1998. "The site is magical, irrigated by hot springs that make the vegetation and The climate of that area is more tropical than a Himalayan valley. And that has generated a pilgrimage of kids who go there to smoke marijuana that grows everywhere. They go in search of fun, partying and 'raves' , in search of their particular Shangri-La, like what Kathmandu was in the 70s or Ibiza in the early 80s."
The thing is that this area is right next to Manikaran, a sacred place for Hindus with a colony of Tibetan Buddhists in exile. "A tremendously religious site collides with a crazy festive world and to that is added that drug traffickers travel through those mountains of the Himalayan range, because it is an area for drug smuggling from Afghanistan, which makes the place a tinderbox."
"There are still cases and posters of missing people," adds Calvo, who points out: "Some also disappear on their own, because it is an attractive place where you can live with little money."
The first reaction that Herrán's character has after the attack is to find the culprits. He is enraged. And since he can't find them, "the culprits are the town where he has been locked up. Until there comes a moment when he realizes that what he has to do is accept what he did. And once you tell yourself "The process of internal healing begins." A slow process that involves catharsis in an isolated place, alone with your own ghosts and among unknown people.
Despite the harshness of the filming conditions - without a crane or tracking shot and filming at 6,000 meters of altitude with altitude sickness - Calvo captures some truly beautiful landscapes and considers that filming in that place has been an "incredible and unforgettable experience." An experience that is left with a Tibetan proverb "that says something like that we do not have the ability to decide about life and death, but we do have the ability to decide how to live our own life. And it is something that we should all apply because it is absolutely true. It's up to you to live angry or happy," he says.
