"The worst was not the situation experienced, but everything that came after," says the victim of sexual assault by five men who called themselves La Manada during the Sanfermines of 2016. Why did this case have such a social impact? " It was gathered that it happened at a party with a lot of media coverage, that it was a young girl, that it was a group of aggressors and that we came from a historical context of judicial sentences, rapes and murders that produced boredom. And there are cases that are the last straw that breaks the case. glass,” responds Almudena Carracedo, screenwriter, producer and director along with Robert Bahar of 'You are not alone: The fight against La Manada', a documentary film that reconstructs the case that generated the first
That this case became so high-profile in the media also had to do with “that a defense lawyer decided to take the case to the sets and the victim was questioned, which provoked a reaction from the street,” adds Bahar in conversation. with La Vanguardia. In the documentary three events are intertwined: the Pamplona case, the attack that occurred in Pozoblanco - committed by four of the same accused - and the murder of Nagore Laffage in 2008, also a victim of a case of sexual violence in Pamplona. The final point comes in 2018, when a million women and young people appealed to the power of sisterhood, took to the streets shouting 'I do believe you' and spread the hashtag
“When we started to investigate this case we realized that despite all this media coverage, in reality we did not have all the pieces together,” says Carracedo, for whom a very diffuse vision had remained precisely due to the noise produced. “Many people are unaware of the Supreme Court ruling that judicially settled this case,” he continues. “We thought it was important to explain the complete version and in a very rigorous way from the perspective of the victims and the people who accompanied them, which is exactly the version of the proven facts. We are not talking about two antagonistic versions."
The first thing the team did was ask permission from the Pamplona victim's family because, without it, they would not have continued. “We didn't want to do more damage.” When they got the go-ahead they were also aware that she was not going to participate directly. Her words are collected verbatim from judicial statements, from two letters that she sent to the media, from the testimony of the victim assistance person who accompanied her all this time and her current lawyer. “We wanted to tell the story from her perspective,” highlights the filmmaker.
In the case of the Pozoblanco victim, they were able to meet and interview her because she wanted to tell her story in the first person, although she does not appear on screen. Her voice has been anonymized through an actress, Carolina Yuste, just as the voice of the Sanfermines victim is provided by Natalia de Molina. “It seemed very important to us to humanize them even if it was with a fictitious name in the film. The idea was to interweave those two stories together with that of, of course, that of Nagore Laffage, whose mother does participate directly with her testimony.
“We wanted to shed light on a universal truth much larger than these three cases.” All the people who have participated in the film, including the victims, have seen the film before its release. “The family of the Sanfermines victim did not want to change anything, it seemed good to them, and the Pozoblanco victim asked us to make it known that the film seemed fair, necessary, respectful and, most importantly, zero morbidity,” he says. Carracedo.
The blaming of victims and the scourge of machismo are two themes present organically in the film. “An example of our work around the idea of victim blaming is how we linked the story of the La Manada trial to the Nagore murder trial. During the day of the La Manada trial, at the moment we are seeing a questioning of the victim inside the courtroom, we pause and listen to the testimony of Asun Casasola (Nagore's mother) to return to that same courtroom eight years later. With cinema you can connect ideas and in this case it helped us to make visible that the blaming of the victim does not occur only in one case but is a pattern that is repeated,” explains Bahar.
“Cinema has the ability to make us put ourselves in the shoes of characters and in this case, as a documentary, of real characters. That a viewer can put themselves in the shoes of the victims and end up with another look after watching the film was one of the important objectives," explains Carracedo, who denounces that sexual violence "is not an isolated case but a structural problem that “It affects us all, women and men.”
What image or phrase from the documentary do you stay with? “With that of a police officer who states “No one wins here,” and repeats it, in reference to the fact that as a society we have all lost because the case has passed,” Carracedo responds. Bahar is left with the final letter that the Pamplona victim sent to the media and which is included at the end of the documentary: “She says that “you can get out” and encourages everyone who goes through that situation to tell someone. family member, a friend or a police officer or that they write it in a tweet," recalls Bahar, for whom this phrase "goes with the idea that before trying to solve something, it must be made visible."
The repercussion of this case “represented a before and after in how we think about sexual violence, which has gone from being silenced to really beginning to make it visible. If it remains silent, it is impossible to solve it,” concludes Carracedo.
