{"id":86110,"date":"2025-09-26T04:53:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T04:53:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/86110\/"},"modified":"2025-09-26T04:53:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-26T04:53:08","slug":"jose-luis-guerin-on-good-valley-stories-and-cinematic-value-of-docs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/86110\/","title":{"rendered":"Jos\u00e9 Luis Guerin on ‘Good Valley Stories’ and Cinematic Value of Docs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tGoya-winning Spanish filmmaker Jos\u00e9 Luis Guerin is back in competition at the San Sebasti\u00e1n Film Festival<\/a> with \u201cGood Valley Stories<\/a>\u201d (\u201cHistorias del Buen Valle\u201d), almost a quarter of a century after \u201cWork in Progress\u201d played at the Basque fest in 2001. The film takes place over three years in Valbona, a suburban district of Barcelona, as Guer\u00edn prods at issues of displacement, identity, urban life, and ecological conflicts in this small neighborhood that serves as a microcosm of the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSpeaking with Variety ahead of the world premiere, Guer\u00edn says he has had his work featured in some of the largest festivals across the world, but for a film like \u201cGood Valley Stories,\u201d it feels right to have the world premiere in his home country. \u201cSome aspects of it will inevitably be lost in other countries, so I feel San Sebasti\u00e1n is the most appropriate place for a first presentation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHe goes on to recall how the project spawned out of a commission from Barcelona\u2019s Museum of Contemporary Art. \u201cThey proposed a small piece about this disadvantaged neighborhood and I gladly accepted it,\u201d he says. \u201cThen I went to this peripheral neighborhood I didn\u2019t know, despite having lived in Barcelona for so many years. I made the piece for the museum super fast, but I was left with the desire to develop that work because I began to discover that the echoes and the resonances of the entire world could be contained in this very small and humble neighborhood. Therein lies the vocation I aspire to as a filmmaker, to find the universal perspective in local realities.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe filmmaker reiterated how neighborhoods like Valbona feel somewhat universal, given that \u201cgentrification is a worldwide phenomenon.\u201d \u201cCity centres are converted into tourist attractions, essentially becoming theme parks inaccessible to the local population. These are people who are then marginalized to the peripheries, where a more human, normal daily life remains. It\u2019s a process we can recognize everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut the director did not want to look at the periphery \u201conly as a space of victimization,\u201d especially as he finds great richness in such spaces. \u201cIt is the same case with cinema itself, where the spaces that offer most freedom and creativity aren\u2019t so much at the centre of the industry but on these peripheries.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tGuerin spent around a year selecting characters for the film, and added a few more once filming had started, as his method comprises filming and editing concurrently \u201cto allow me to develop a deeper relationship with the people I film while assessing the plot lines.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cEach of these characters helps synthesize the general human landscape of the neighborhood,\u201d says the filmmaker. \u201cThe man without memory is related to the housing blocks that have no memory of the neighborhood. Some characters are farmers who call themselves Catalans of the original land. Others represent the Spanish immigration from the South, and others the global emigration of the new century.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tGood Valley Stories<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of San Sebasti\u00e1n Film Festival<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAll of the world\u2019s current conflicts, from climate change to racism, emigration and real estate speculation, everything is felt there,\u201d he highlights. \u201cThere are also traces of the past and signs of the future. So I was coordinating those times with the time of the seasons and finally the time of the film itself. The viewer can intuit how the film is being built, which is why, instead of \u2018directed by,\u2019 I go with \u2019work in progress by\u2019 Jos\u00e9 Luis Guer\u00edn. That will always remain because the film is an open, living process.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe veteran also emphasizes how one of his great battles is \u201cto promote festivals that don\u2019t discriminate against documentaries.\u201d \u201cOn too many occasions, documentary film is seen almost as television reporting. It\u2019s not that documentaries are not a tool for sociological, anthropological, or activist research, but they have to be in dialogue with cinema itself.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tLast week, Variety critic Owen Gleiberman looked at the case of recent festival films like Kaouther Ben-Hania\u2019s \u201cThe Voice of Hind Rajab\u201d and James Vanderbilt\u2019s \u201cNuremberg\u201d<\/a> to investigate how the use of documentary footage in both films \u2014 a recording of a Palestinian girl\u2019s last words, images of the Nazi concentration camps \u2014 may be more powerful than the films themselves.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen posed with the question, Guerin says there is a certain condescension in the way the industry looks at documentary as solely a medium for social work and cause-driven films. \u201cIf you\u2019re filming the Nuremberg trials, your moral duty is to seek the most accurate image without any manipulation. Cinema sometimes has to know how to give in to a cause, but another thing entirely is to impoverish cinema by attributing to documentary cinema a mere and strict role of denunciation. For me, cinema has to do with a desire for revelation, to discover something.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019ve learned almost everything from fiction cinema, so, for me, the division between documentary and fiction is irrelevant,\u201d he adds. \u201cYou have good cinema and bad cinema. To create a separation for documentary is to treat it condescendingly in the same way it is sometimes reduced to the goodness of the causes it approaches. Social cinema must be nurtured, but there is hardly any genuine critical thinking about documentary cinema because there is a guilt about how you might mishandle something that deals with historical memory or denounces conflicts.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cGood Valley Stories\u201d is a Spanish-French co-production between Los Ilusos Films, Perspective Films, 3CAT, Orfeo Iluso AIE and produced by Javier Lafuente, Jon\u00e1s Trueba, Ga\u00eblle Jones and Jos\u00e9 Luis Guerin. Shellac handles sales.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Goya-winning Spanish filmmaker Jos\u00e9 Luis Guerin is back in competition at the San Sebasti\u00e1n Film Festival with \u201cGood…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":86111,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[263],"tags":[18,117,56785,19,17,56786,327,52331],"class_list":{"0":"post-86110","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-good-valley-stories","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-jose-luis-guerin","14":"tag-movies","15":"tag-san-sebastiu00e1n-film-festival"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86110\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}