These Walls

I have worked in the audiovisual industry since 1985, directing commercial films and shows, designing programming line-ups, and developing all kinds of film and video projects. My career combines technical experience, curiosity, and a constant interest in stories that inspire.

I feel especially committed to sharing stories that amplify transformative messages and strengthen values that help us navigate our times with greater awareness. Each project seeks not only to entertain, but also to spark reflection and dialogue, connecting aesthetics, emotion, and substance.

This project emerged from my curiosity about the surroundings of a place where I played as a child: the ruins of a building, a railway bridge, and a train line.

The only indication of what had gone on there was an anonymous poem on one of the walls. It ended: “and evoke the terrible times lived during the construction of this bridge”.

What as a child I saw as mysterious ruins, became for the adult a call to understand what had happened there.

The research process has allowed me to discover why these ruins remain anonymous, like so many other postwar sites of repression. It reflects a premeditated and relentless plan aimed at silence, oblivion, and thus the rewriting of collective memory.

The newspeak fabricated by the victors of the war twisted life to the point of delirium: the defenders of the constitution were accused of being rebels. The rebels—the coup plotters—called themselves peacemakers. And, in a new turn of language, the defenders of the Republic became sinners who had to atone for their offenses and make restitution for the harm done to their country. The final stage was silence, to provoke the oblivion upon which the victors wrote and imposed their “pacifying” memory.

The effects have been devastating: ignorance, lack of knowledge, and even denial dominate our society.

But a poem injected information into the system… Like a message in a bottle, te poem written by someone who knew those times has made the journey to our subconscious.

Our society is built upon major gaps in our knowledge of our recent history. Triumphant narratives shape our coexistence, while others remain in the shadows, distorting the mirror in which we see ourselves. I am driven by the conviction that only a full understanding of everything that makes us who we are will allow us to move forward.

After learning what those ruins had been – a penal colony -, who its inhabitants were – Franco’s Republican prisoners, how the penal system operated, and how the colonies functioned, I explore the traces that this crafty form of repression has left on our present society.

Today, the third and fourth generations want to learn. In this way, we discover the layers, beneath which there is a wounded society that has been unable to carry out the rites of burial, mourning, and farewell. A society in need of meeting places, what Pierre Nora calls sites of memory, which allow us to recognize and recognize ourselves, and transmit the possibility of knowing their history to future generations.

APR