Sara Polo Madrid
Madrid
Updated Saturday, January 20, 2024-21:28
Chronicle The four rescues of the fishing family of Nuestra Señora de Loreto
When
Pepe Durá
boarded the fishing boat
Francisco and Catalina
that sunny day in June 2006 and sighed, watching the coast of Santa Pola
recede
, "let's see what the sea brings us," he had no idea what was about to happen. arrive.
That would not be just another outing with his crew, those three months on the high seas for every 20 days on land with his family.
A boat with 51 migrants on board would forever change his life, and also that of the rest of European citizens.
The miniseries that RTVE
premieres
this Sunday fictionalizes that real milestone with
Luis Tosar
as the ship's skipper.
A man of simple life became, without eating or drinking it, an anonymous hero for a society thirsty for human stories.
And yet, he himself experienced it with much less significance: "The Durá take away the glamor of everything, their logic does not include any other possibility other than picking up people who are in trouble at sea," says Tosar, who worked closely with the Valencian family to create the character, "when you ask them if they still think the same thing, they answer, with total normality:
'There is no other, it is the law of the sea
.'"
That comment, spoken in passing, gives its name to a story that took a long time to find its place.
Enrique Domingo
Flipy
, who rose to fame as the mad scientist in
El Hormiguero
but is also a producer, toured offices and offices with his written pages and his PowerPoint presentation, and no one saw that it had the vocation of a movie.
Until it came into the hands of the Valencian regional broadcaster
À Punt
and
RTVE
.
"It's a local story that talks about an international problem," Flipy justifies.
The team filmed 18 days on the high seas.À PUNT / RTVE
The story in question focuses on the first civilian rescue of migrants adrift in Mediterranean waters by the crew of the
Francisco and Catalina
, who took 51 migrants on board - 43 men, eight women, one of them pregnant, and a two-year-old girl - near
Libya
and decided to take them to
Malta
in search of asylum.
Their face-to-face collision with the European bureaucracy left them trapped in international waters for seven days, crammed into just 50 square meters and with the resulting diplomatic crisis.
That incident changed European immigration legislation.
José
Pastor
, director of Film and Fiction at RTVE, found it interesting to bet on a story based on a real event: "It has an extra attraction that invites you to go to Google when you finish it to find out even more," he says.
Faced with an issue that polarizes society such as illegal immigration, he warns: "We should not see it from a politicized perspective, the series does not intend to whitewash or send any type of message, only to excite and confirm, once again, that cliché that "Reality is stranger than fiction."
And yet, for the leading actors, the objective of a project like this is clearly something else.
"The Mediterranean is full of corpses and it is good that fiction makes people empathize," says
Blanca Portillo
, co-star of
The Law of the Sea
with a, let's say, less grateful role.
She plays
Andrea de Velasco
, Spanish ambassador in Malta at the time of the incident that she mediated between offices to achieve a happy ending for fifty immigrants from
Francisco and Catalina
.
Blanca Portillo is the Spanish ambassador to Malta in Law of the Sea.À PUNT / RTVE
Are political no's
better understood
when one immerses oneself in bureaucracy?
"Understanding is my obligation to understand why a character does what he does," Portillo acknowledges, and alludes to a scene in fiction in which another diplomat shows the remains of the hundreds of boats that have reached the Maltese coast in recent years. six months.
"That is a blow, it is evident that it is not easy to accept all those arrivals, so I understand it," he continues, and emphasizes: "Another thing is that you share it."
Although she had no relationship with the royal ambassador and, for obvious reasons, doubts that she would have been able to go into details about the ins and outs of that operation, the actress does not hide her admiration.
"She was determined to find a solution, a way to fix things when it seemed impossible," she says.
The most emotional moment of filming was when her character visited the ship with the migrants on board.
"It made me click in my head," she says, "it's not the same to see a bunch of men lying on a beach while others give them water on television than to get in there and look them in the eyes."
And here we have to stop along the way to explain that, with the aim of making it as real as possible, director
Alberto Ruiz Rojo
decided to film aboard a real ship, manufactured for the occasion by a shipowner from Almería, for 18 hard days.
"When we started we didn't even know if we were all going to fit in there," he admits, "we went out at dawn and entrusted ourselves to the good sea. Some got seasick one day, but in general everything flowed well. We were aware that we were telling a story important".
Luis Tosar stars in The Law of the Sea.À PUNT / RTVE
We return aboard the ship with the ambassador in full catharsis in front of all those fictional immigrants, many of whom actually arrived by boat to Spain in their real lives.
In a moment of discussion between the laws of the land and those of the sea, she blurts out to the ship's skipper: "This reality that you are experiencing is solved in the offices."
And right there, in that lapidary phrase,
Blanca Portillo
finds the justification for her character.
"It is essential to tell those conversations, those walls behind closed doors, that we know exist but to which we never have access," she says.
The summer of 2006 would be only the first rescue of the
Durá
family , who have pulled almost a hundred people from the sea, acts that have earned them the
Prince of Asturias Award
and the
Gold Medal of the Red Cross
.
However, despite what it may seem, it was not the most complicated.
In 2018, Pepe's son,
Pascual Durá
, experienced harassment from Libyan patrolmen after rescuing 12 immigrants, in the face of more than a week of inaction from the Spanish Government.
"The paradoxical thing is that, 20 years later, everything has gotten worse. We are going backwards and that is tremendous, because there are more and more people who need to escape," denounces
Blanca Portillo
.
"We are not legislating well, humanitarian rescue should be a commitment of all Mediterranean countries."
Luis Tosar
agreed to play
Pepe Durá
, with a mix of Valencian - an Alicante variant - and heavily accented Spanish, with an eye on responsibility: "Fiction can have a value beyond pure entertainment," he assures.
"We have the tools to bring to the viewer realities repeated a thousand times that turn the human into statistics. We live doped up in a world of news that has to be increasingly fresher because if we don't get nervous and, unfortunately, we will drift adrift. there are every day."
Faced with possible adverse reactions to an issue that causes strong polarization, the actors refer to pure humanity.
"It is possible that there are those who will deny that this happens, that it is real," says
Blanca Portillo
.
"But if someone is not moved by this series, it is because it is made of pine wood."