Todo es cárcel, Letters from an inner Exile

The initial impulse goes back about ten years. I used to spend time at a beach north of A Coruña when someone casually mentioned, almost like a curiosity, that a Francoist concentration camp had once stood there. It was difficult to imagine that such a thing could have happened in that place. I asked what was known about it, whether there were any photographs or documents…but the answer was no. “Yet the camp operated for more than a year, right next to the village, in full view of everyone,” I insisted. No, nothing remained, no traces, and certainly no sign explaining what had happened there. The place had become “just” a beach.

I wanted to learn more and, after a long search, I found the memoirs of an Asturian journalist who had spent a year imprisoned in that camp. When I returned to the beach after reading his testimony, the landscape had completely changed, even though it remained the same. The dunes, the hidden corners, the small stream the prisoners watched while dreaming of escape… I felt an overwhelming emotion, painful yet liberating: that of a guilty landscape, yet that had somehow been freed. That was the spark that gave birth to the project.

Later, I wanted to understand how Spanish cinema had addressed the subject of concentration camps. I was astonished to discover that they were almost as absent from our cinema as they are from our everyday life. The comparison was striking: there are hundreds of films about Nazi concentration camps, to the point that they have become a cinematic subgenre, whereas there is virtually nothing about Francoist camps.

Precisely the challenge of revealing that topography and, through it, the sheer scale of the Francoist camp system and, more broadly, the regime’s policy of mass incarceration. That was my first objective, almost an obsession: to make a film that, like a memorial, would bring together a large number of sites that had once housed concentration camps or prisons: beaches, former factories, airports, castles, convents, schools, bullrings…The title of the film came from that ambition and from a sentence said by the celebrated poet and former Francoist prisoner Marcos Ana: “At that time, all of Spain was a prison.”

As you know, film financing is a long process, and during that time, I continued my research. More places, stories and narrative threads kept emerging, and it became clear that the film needed something beyond the historical facts themselves, another narrative layer capable of connecting different spaces and different temporalities. At the same time, I was acutely aware of the shadow cast by Nazi camps and their cinematic representations. I was afraid of falling into some of the clichés associated with that kind of film. In other words, although I was dealing with a subject that had never really been explored, I didn’t want audiences to feel they were watching something familiar.

I came to think that, as in the greatest literature on the camps (Levi, Semprún and others), the most powerful approach was to portray the alienation produced by the fascist machine through the individual’s subjective experience. Carmen and Ángel entered the film for that reason. Their letters function as a counterpoint, reminding us of what we fundamentally are. Despite the hostile circumstances, they speak above all as two people in love, as individuals who cling to that love in order to survive within an environment of submission and increasing dehumanisation.

Rather than showing the consequences of a historical problem through the individual trajectory of a single character, I wanted to explore cinema’s ability to condense a broader social vision. To try to capture what philosophers call the “spirit of an age” and what, in this film, historians refer to as “sociological Francoism”. Where does the fascism we still live alongside reside? What continues to nourish it? Unfortunately, I believe these questions remain very relevant today.

Given the “density” of Todo es cárcel, I also wanted to avoid a certain solemnity in the film’s tone. I also wanted to move away from the psychological conventions of mainstream fiction, where everything revolves around a heroine whose conflict culminates in a cathartic and often moralising scene. What she does, and what happens to her, certainly carries meaning, but what truly matters may instead linger in the atmosphere: behind a silent and seemingly innocent landscape she visits, or beneath the apparent sincerity of a conversation with her cousin.

During the research and location scouting, I discovered a dimension of Francoist repression that seemed essential if the film was to remain faithful to the portrait it sought to draw. I think it is something that is not exclusively Spanish, but that carries particular weight in Spain: what we call fascism as well as the traumas it has left behind, exist and manifest themselves on two levels, both collective and individual. The historical events and the collective narrative of a country - the public sphere, as you call it - are just as important as the traces that political history has left within the family trees of most Spanish families.

What is distinctive about Spain is that these traces function like “underground currents”, hidden scars passed down through at least three generations. This is true of almost every Spanish family. I encourage everyone to investigate their own history. I myself discovered astonishing things about my grandfather that no one had ever told me.

In the film, this takes shape through the protagonist’s family story. It constitutes a third layer of writing, another narrative thread that gradually develops until it culminates in the scene where the cousins argue over their grandfather’s home movies. Through this scene, I wanted to represent the conflict that has divided the “two Spains” for generations: on one side, the majority demanding memory and justice; on the other, the heirs of the victors of the Civil War and their privileges, who continue to obstruct access to information, to the remains of victims, and to the implementation of laws. In other words, they continue to impose a pre-democratic reality founded upon enforced forgetting.

As for the film’s structure itself, I like films that begin by presenting places or characters that seem unrelated. As a viewer, I enjoy the feeling of being fascinated while also slightly disoriented, relying on intuition and judgement. It is an act of trust between the audience and the film. It also compels us to remain attentive, to be imaginative, to look for possible connections, and ultimately not to become passive spectators. Therefore, the protagonist’s family story—and, more generally, all the narrative strands and dimensions of the film—is therefore woven together gradually, sometimes in a deliberately elliptical way.

For me, this is an immensely important subject, and it is precisely why I wanted to make this film. I believe it helps us understand certain things happening today, both in my country and in the world. Straub once said that making a revolution meant putting very old but forgotten things back in their rightful place. Perhaps that is why, more than eighty years later, and difficult as it may seem to believe, this issue continues to provoke discomfort and continues to be obstructed…

That’s an important precision. Your question made me answer too quickly, when in fact the opposite is true. It’s true that memory, on the one hand, and cinema and its methodology, on the other, are two different things, but they do not exist on separate planes. We cannot, and should not, separate them. To me, this is one of the great problems facing contemporary cinema, and one of the reasons for its gradual disappearance, I mean as a language.

Todo es cárcel is different from my previous films. It is not built around legitimising itself through formal innovation; quite the contrary. It arises from a desire to remember, to resurrect, to call upon everything that once united us (memory, which is also the memory of cinema) and which, as I said, I see gradually disappearing.

My generation? It is true that when you have not lived through events directly, you may enjoy greater freedom in thinking about and narrating them. But I cannot speak on behalf of my generation. I can only recount what I have seen: the concentration camps and forced labour served as the Franco regime’s septic tank. Together with exile, they absorbed everything the regime regarded as beyond redemption. Many people never returned.

Spain’s supposedly exemplary democratic transition was built on continuity and perpetuated enforced oblivion through the Amnesty Law, which remains in force today. Afterwards, the long years of absolute majorities for the socialist party did little, if anything, to bring this reality to light. As the great Spanish journalist Iñaki Gabilondo has observed, in Spain we traded progress for prosperity. In other words, the country became satisfied with economic improvement and showed little interest in deepening what we call democratic principles.

Ultimately, whatever progress has been made is almost entirely due to the historical memory movements, that is, to the families of the victims. It’s sad but it’s true: it’s pain that has brought us this far. At the same time, as Susan Sontag wrote, “Because we have survived, we must be grateful.”

In this respect, and resisting both the didactic impulse of social cinema and the moralism typical of conventional dramaturgy, I believe cinema should aspire to something else. Perhaps it cannot transmit total knowledge, but rather the very impossibility of a totalising knowledge: “to try, nevertheless, to explain what cannot be fully explained”. 

In Spain, we are still far from knowing what truly happened. My film reveals only a tiny part of the tip of that iceberg.