Daniel Arjona Madrid
Madrid
Updated Sunday, February 25, 2024-07:31
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It happened on the night of Friday, February 13, 2004. Gabriel Montoya Vidal, alias
Baby
, and Emilio Suárez Trashorras had
a tremendous party in Luanco
, a seaside town 15 kilometers from Avilés, where they lived.
The party
got out of hand
.
There were drinks and shots of coke, they broke a guy's tooth with a punch and, at dawn, they returned to Avilés in search of an
after-party
, the Miniteide, where they continued drinking and taking drugs until four in the afternoon.
Emilio, distraught after 20 hours of walking, crawled to his house.
He was 26 years old and had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Two hours later he was going to marry Carmen Toro.
His friend,
Baby
, 16, was not invited and went to rest.
Just a few days ago he had returned from a trip to Madrid where, at Emilio's request, he delivered
a backpack loaded with dynamite to the Islamist commando led by Jamal Ahmidan,
the Chino, who less than a month later would blow up several trains in Madrid, murdering 192 people.
This is how See You in Another Life, the new Disney + series, was filmed
When the journalist
Manuel Jabois
was finally able to have several meetings with Gabriel Montoya Vidal, the minor who turned out to be the first convicted of the attacks of March 11, 2004 in Madrid, he was amazed at how
a vulgar adventure of a small-time criminal had led to a catastrophic end
.
And that's how he wanted to tell it in
See You in This Life or the Next
(Planeta, 2016).
On the verge of two decades since the attacks that split the History of Spain in two, a shocking six-episode miniseries produced and directed by
brothers Jorge and Alberto Sánchez-Cabezudo
adapts that book for Disney+.
To know more
Chimpún interview.
Manuel Jabois: "I have only experienced four mournings and they were for four relationships with which I aspired to eternity"
Editor: IÑAKO DÍAZ-GUERRA
Manuel Jabois: "I have only experienced four mournings and they were for four relationships with which I aspired to eternity"
THEATER.
11M excuse for a cursed love
Editor: JAVIER VILLÁN Madrid
11M excuse for a cursed love
See You in Another Life
premieres on March 6, but on the 4th it can be seen at the Malaga Festival.
It is the end of an obsession for the Sánchez-Cabezudos: «We have been behind this book for a long time.
We bought the options twice to adapt it and twice they expired.
Such a delicate topic fueled our doubts.
But we were so fascinated by Jabois' view of his book,
how something so small can have such great significance
... At first we were thinking of a movie, but we realized that the structure of a miniseries allowed us to better develop the characters and the three narrative arcs that alternate:
the 16-year-old boy captured by Trashorras
, the poor child he was and the adult who comes out of confinement.
"We never considered a documentary."
Filmed in Madrid and Asturias in the summer of 2023, the miniseries flies with unusual realism, unfolds the criminal plot in several directions without anything being left out or missing, and brings together a cast of actors as little known as they are outstanding.
Roberto Gutiérrez,
Baby
,
was discovered by chance by the casting team outside a McDonald's in Oviedo
, after interviewing 200 kids.
They saw a boy with mohawk hair and self-confidence, they attacked him and immediately decided that it had to be him.
And the Catalan
Pol López
plays an
amazing and terrifying
Emilio Trashorras whose performance, Jorge and Alberto Sánchez-Cabezudo say, "embroiders one of the best villains in Spanish cinema."
Roberto Gutiérrez, in the role of 'Baby'.
Manuel Jabois does not hold back his enthusiasm for the result: «The great value of this series filmed by two monsters with enormous talent is that when you see it, you think: this is what happened, what happened in Spain not long ago and what he experienced. those people.
The journalist today in El País managed to find
Baby
, also called
El Gitanillo,
thanks to the clue that his then EL MUNDO colleague
Joaquín Manso
gave him .
«It is a very unliterary book, says Jabois.
«
I wrote it consciously with a very austere language
, devoid of adjectives and opinions and, for that reason, the result was as graphic, as cinematic as is often said.
Now I have read it again and I remembered well the conversations with Gabriel, how he pestered him non-stop on the phone to ask him for details.
I went to Bilbao to talk to
Baby
and then I clicked and clicked on the recordings, getting more and more excited as I compared her traditional testimony with the facts of the trial.
He wanted to know
how he was dressed on that day, what her room was like, if it was raining
.
In stories as big as this one I want the reader to know the smallest details so that they feel part of it.
I never pursued a research book, only to show what the life of some quinquis from Avilés was like for four or five months.
After publishing the book in 2016, Jabois received a letter from Trashorras from prison where he was sentenced to a prison sentence of 34,715 years and six months for providing, in exchange for hashish, the dynamite that would blow up the trains in Atocha, El Pozo and Saint Eugenia.
The same one with which a few days later its members would commit suicide in Leganés, taking with them the geo
Francisco Javier Torronteras
.
El Minero
, as he was known in Avilés due to his previous employment in
the famous Conchita Mine
from which he would steal the dynamite, confessed to the journalist that he had read his book and that everything he said was true.
Now, the creators of the series say that their biggest concern was that the victims who watched the series felt treated with respect.
They contacted the association of victims of 11-M and
dedicated an entire chapter, the penultimate one, to recreating some of the devastating interventions of relatives and injured people
during the macro-trial of 2007. «When we transferred the series to a group of victims it was one of the most intense moments of our professional life.
They understood that we were not seeking to whitewash the protagonists, what we wanted was for one of the most transcendental moments of our democracy not to be forgotten.
"They felt reflected, we believe, but we do not want to speak for them."
20 years have passed since the massacre.
As the series reflects, those events opened a deep gap in Spanish society: even the millions of Spaniards born after 11M, who have a vague idea of what happened,
breathe the poisoned air of the polarization that has permeated the country since then
.
«I remember a phrase that caused a great commotion.
It is said that it changed the course of the elections,” concludes Jabois.
"It was when Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba said: 'The Spanish do not deserve a government that lies to them.'
Look how much better politics was then for something like that to mark us, accusing politicians of lying was very serious.
"Now we wouldn't care."