Brothers Jorge and Alberto Sánchez-Cabezudo (director and producer, respectively) have a filmography that includes titles such as Angosto [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Alina Sigaro
intervista: Belén Bernuy
intervista: Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo
scheda film], a film acclaimed by audiences and critics alike, and the series Crematorio and The Zone. This year, they released See You in Another Life [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Jorge e Alberto Sánchez-Ca…
scheda series], a miniseries starring Pol López, Quim Ávila, Tamara Casellas and the great discovery Roberto Gutiérrez. Based on the book by Manuel Jabois, it tells the inner-history behind the brutal attacks in Atocha (Madrid) in 2004 and which can now be seen all over the world on Disney+ and Hulu. Last week they both attended Cinema Jove Film Festival to present it to the public.

Cineuropa: Do people outside Spain remember the Madrid 11M bombings?
Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo: Yes, like 9/11, they are very significant events. We see that the reaction is universal, as it could have happened in any neighbourhood in any city in the world. And any country, unfortunately, has suffered a similar attack: you can easily empathise with it, because all countries have a similar misfortune close to them.

What interested you about the novel by journalist Manuel Jabois on which it is based?
Alberto Sánchez-Cabezudo: It was published in 2015, we read it afterwards and we were really interested by the story of 11M, when he decided to interview the 15-year-old boy who was the first to be convicted of the attack. When you read it, you remember the attack and the trial that followed, but you are not aware that the first person to be convicted was such a young Spaniard. And being able to tell it in this way allowed us to manage a different, small, neighbourhood scale, with its trivialisation of evil: how something as big as a terrorist attack can be hidden in the everyday. We went after the rights to the novel, which were taken, but we insisted and were able to buy them in 2018. It all gained momentum as the twentieth anniversary of the attack approached.

It must have been quite complex to deal with a subject like terrorism.
JS-C: We expected it to be a minefield, but in the end it wasn’t so bad. Other fictions had also dealt with terrorism, such as La línea invisible [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Mariano Barroso
scheda series] or Maixabel [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Icíar Bollaín
scheda film], with its underlying political debate. This meant that those who took part in the project were sensitised and aware, not only us when it came to writing, but also Borja Soler, director of two episode, or the cinematographer or the music composer. The creative decisions were based on morality: everything was thought through in order to tell it well.

JS-C: It was very clear to us that we had to be thorough. Because there was something shocking: the protagonist didn’t regret what he did. This is striking. The story of the series was not going to be a path of redemption for this character: we were going to explain the context in which it happened and follow this person who was an eyewitness of how the sale of explosives took place, but in no way did we intend to clean him up or save him.

In this portrayal of the neighbourhoods, the series is reminiscent of Spanish “Quinqui” film of the seventies.
JS-C: Yes, therein lies the naturalistic vocation of the series. Our premise was that if we were going to talk about 11M, with all the political debate it generated, we needed it to be something extremely naturalistic, something that breathed truth and did not feel like a fable. We wanted to tell it according to an eyewitness account, as was accepted by the judge in the subsequent trial.

In this vein, the series sometimes reconstructs the events almost like a documentary.
AS-C: We had to be thorough, drawing from the novel, but we also did our own research and read through the summary of the actual macro-trial. Also, knowing that there were victims behind it, it should be an exercise in historical memory. The attack had an impact on us as a society, leaving an enormous wound. The victims were important and needed to be heard, so we positioned them so that they became the protagonists and told in detail what the 11M attack at Atocha station was like.

JS-C: Ever since we started working on the scripts for See You in Another Life we knew that we didn't want to film the attack or tell the story. We didn't want to show blood or sensationalism, so we looked for a way to narrate it through the witness statements of the attack, and they told it in their own voices, which hit hard. The victims themselves tell the story of the attack, and established the moral point for the series.