Original title: Cabanyal any zero · Frédérique Pressmann · Spain · 2018 · Script: Frédérique Pressm · Documental.
The Valencian production premieres this week Cabanyal any zero, documentary feature film directed by the French director Frédérique Pressmann and produced by the Valencian companies DACSA Produccions and entre2prises around a topic that, for a while, kept the political confrontation in our city in suspense. It can also be seen on Wednesday 22/5 at 8:30 p.m.. at the Babel Cinemas.
Start this work before the municipal elections of the year 2015 in which the Popular Party, led by then-mayor Rita Barberá, would lose the mayorship of Valencia after more than twenty years at the helm. For part of the inhabitants of the maritime neighborhood of Cabañal, In those elections, the possible continuity of a project that they had starkly opposed was at stake.: the expansion of Blasco Ibañez Avenue into a large road that would reach the beach, splitting the neighborhood in half and demolishing, along the way, a good part of the homes that make it up, many of them centuries old. According to residents, The city council project prioritized speculative interests over the coexistence of a neighborhood inhabited by families that, In some cases, they had been there for generations, with the covert ambition of destroying its social fabric and, above all, of class. In those times, a candidate Joan Ribó approached the neighborhood in the middle of the electoral campaign to praise his admirable resistance against a city council that had consented and promoted his slow physical and, we could say, spiritual. The elections caused the expected political change and the plan to expand the avenue was suspended. end of story. ¿Victoria? Not at all. That was just the beginning of a new stage..
Frédérique Pressmann wanted to construct an intimate story of a community that understands that it is in a permanent state of siege. To do this, she chooses a series of characters as representatives of those sensitivities that she puts into play and those she has followed during the three years that the director herself resided in the neighborhood for her research., offering them their camera as a springboard to express their feelings and demands. And it is perhaps at this point, to serve as a platform, speaker of those demands from which some of the problems that this work contains arise.. And the fact is that the director adopts a position more of an activist than a pure filmmaker., a debt that is reflected in a piece weighed down by excessive footage, perhaps fruit of the care or personal affection that Pressmann shows towards his characters and their demands. This fact causes the film to fall into a certain repetition, marked by the constant comings and goings towards one or another of these characters without thereby providing more information to the debate that it proposes, as if at times he was thinking more about satisfying his expectations than those of an objective observer who is oblivious to the conflicts he is trying to expose.. Thus, Pressmann ends up muddying a structure that, properly refined in the assembly room, could work much better, focusing on a speech that escapes us as spectators and whose meaning we do not manage to specify until the film ends, when we will finally be able to tie up all the pieces that seem to spare us with no other intention than to lengthen the show. There is like this in Cabanyal any zero several documentaries in one, depending on the moment in which we had stopped the story, and one feels that one finds oneself several times before a climax that never seems to arrive, thereby affecting our emotional involvement, that wears out as time goes by.
The viewing of this film is not helped much by a camera that in some sequences seems to not quite get the composition right., especially during some of the interviews that punctuate its development. Pressmann, with the probable desire to capture the most intimate face of his characters, Try to make your camera as discreet a presence as possible. But this clandestine intention disturbs some frames that remain, So, decompensated, hindering your viewing, which, if we take into account that sometimes these are long interventions, ends up tiring an eye that feels trapped by the tension of removing the obstacles that the image itself imposes. A realization that, finally, clings to an aesthetic and structure that does not fit well on a movie screen, by unveiling a piece that was clearly conceived for television.
However, despite these problems, Cabanyal any zero It contains some virtues that should be noted.. The first of them refers to something very unusual in our audiovisual production., the national in general, but very specifically in what refers to Valencian production, generally subject to certain political positions. It's called impartiality. Impartiality that applies, first of all, towards their own characters, from which he does not hesitate to extract his contradictions. Especially significant are the moments in which the director confronts her political and ideological positions with certain ethnic problems that affect the coexistence of the neighborhood and that the director does not avoid.. There are other issues, but this is not the space to take inventory of it.
But impartiality, above all, regarding the development of the context in which this conflict has been developing during the last legislature. After the elections of that distant 2015, hope opened up for the residents of the neighborhood. With the new council, apparently sensitive to their demands, everything would be definitively resolved. Or at least that's what its residents thought.. After many inexplicable delays, The plans for the new town hall would focus on some maintenance works and the recovery of the street layout to, once the construction process of the avenue planned by the previous government was definitively blocked, let the system act as it pleases. Acquisition of plots for the construction of new homes (presumably luxury), purchase of apartments and houses for openly speculative purposes, the arrival of beach and restaurant tourism and new inhabitants with greater purchasing power... slowly the claws of capitalism are hanging over the neighborhood today, displacing many of the old inhabitants and activists who would be left out of the game by the action of the invisible hand of the increase in incomes that, little by little, they are escaping their possibilities. The avenue expansion plan was paralyzed, but the substance of the operation remained the same. Only the face changed.
Derived from this fact, Cabanyal any zero highlights, perhaps involuntarily, one of the biggest mistakes that certain social groups tend to make: the naivety that, supporting the politicians in power, Their problems will be fully attended to in the sense and conditions that they desire.. This is where the documentary becomes doubly tragic., by showing the helplessness of those same actors in the face of a process against which they no longer know how to react and, on the contrary, They seem to feel disarmed. Agents who no longer know how to respond to the confusion that comes with questioning whether they have been protagonists of a heroic and victorious struggle or victims of impudent manipulation.. But that's politics, sirs. Especially notable is the sequence in which Ribó, already in the mayor's office, meets again with the same activists and neighbors that he once praised., to tell them that the new conditions are the result of a process against which they cannot do anything. You cannot put doors on the field, affirms the mayor before some neighbors who seem inhibited and disconcerted.
In the midst of all this hubbub of sometimes unconnected voices, Frédérique Pressmann gives us brilliant glimpses of what every good documentary filmmaker aspires to or should aspire to.: the truth. In front of the almost ruined house that belonged to his parents, one of the women protagonists of his film admires his rehabilitation from the street. After many discussions with his family and proper consultation with the banks, In the end they decided to sell it, unable to meet the costs of the renovation operation necessary to make it habitable again. The house has survived the war, but it will no longer be in your hands. The woman speaks to the camera trying to convince us of the joy it brings her to see her parents' house still standing.. The tone of your speech, the rigidity that shows his face, realize, however, of his defeat. A brutal lesson. GERARDO LEON
