2023-07-06 22:48:59
Just seven days ago, the vice president of the Castilla y León regional government, Juan García Gallardo, described the LGTBI flag as “rainbow rag”. Almost at the same time, the national leader of his party, Vox, assured that he did not celebrate pride because as a heterosexual the claim did not go with him. The same party, together with the PP, voted against displaying the flag in the Balearic Parliament and withdrew it from municipalities such as Vegas del Genil (Granada), Toledo, where it had been displayed for seven years, Ciudad Real, Valladolid, Burgos or Nàquera ( Valencia). They also censored a projection of Lightyear for containing a kiss between two women and the representation of the work Orlando. That is the context where it hits theaters I am madly loving youa film that displays the flag on its poster and that vindicates, values and proudly shows the pioneering activists in the fight for the rights of the group that carried out the first Pride demonstration in the history of Andalusia: the one led by the Homosexual Movement of Revolutionary Action in 1978 in Seville.
The lesbian kiss of ‘Lightyear’ is the exception: family cinema hides sexual diversity
Further
It happened just one year after the first march, the one in Barcelona, and on this occasion the peculiarity was the humble and worker origin of those people who put their bodies to open the way for the new generations. His goal was to achieve total amnesty for all incarcerated people and the immediate abolition of the Social Dangerous Law. A fact from 45 years ago that, unfortunately, sounds too current. I am madly loving you is Historical Memory from a film that drinks from the British social comedy (with Pride y Billy Elliot as great recognized referents). A beautiful and tender film with hints of a queer icon. Its protagonists —among which are Omar Banana, Ana Wagener and Alba Flores— and director, in fact, gave the Pride proclamation in Madrid in a speech where they asked not to take a step back in the face of the advance of the extreme right in Spain .
Its director, Alejandro Marín, has already shown his hand with Bob Pop in lost fagot, and now follows in the wake of that series with a film that comes at the best possible time. Marín is clear that although he is very concerned about what is happening, it does not scare him. “Fear? None. The situation is worrying, but they are not going to silence us, ”she says clearly. He is aware that the film “comes at a time when the focus will be more focused, because the intention was to pay tribute and value the people who started the LGTBI fight in this country and make Historical Memory, which it is very important and more than ever now to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. It sounds a bit ambiguous to say that we are happy to launch now, because obviously the moment is worrying, but if we are contributing something at the moment, all the better ”, he says.
I am madly loving you he is bright and optimistic. Bet on luminosity instead of tragedy, to show what is achieved when you take to the streets together. A revolutionary optimism, a concept that Alejandro Marín likes and that he and his co-writer Carmen Garrido raised from the beginning: “We wanted to make a film that was about heroines and heroes and not about victims, which sounds a bit grandiloquent, but that’s how it is.” . They were victims, but the beautiful thing was the light from which they fought, how brave they were, how unconscious too, because they took to the streets to demonstrate and put themselves in danger. So it seemed very important to us to stay with that facet and transmit it to this day so that they want to continue fighting and to thank these people, because it seems that we forget.
That is another of the tasks that the film fulfills, focusing on fighters that are normally forgotten in the official story. “Before making the movie, I had no idea,” admits Marín who, according to research for the script, felt that he was indebted to these activists and wanted the whole world to know his story, “because the LGBT fight is the fight for human rights, and that concerns us all.”
A response to the far right
The arrival of I am madly loving you to the cinema continues a series of artistic creations that have been fixed in those years of the Transition and in the people who still lived terrified and afraid of being who they really were. Secun de la Rosa recently closed his visit to Madrid with his monologue The pools of Barceloneta, about the LGTB collective in the first years of democracy, and the writer Alana S. Portero has become a literary phenomenon thanks to Bad habitthe story of a trans woman in a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Madrid.
For Alejandro Marín this is being “a bit instinctive”, but he believes that it also responds to a response “to the extreme right in this country”. “We have realized that the rights that we were taking for granted and that we had not valued for a while are being put in danger, and I think that this has meant that, from our little plot, each one tries to say something and show that the Culture is a very useful tool to try to raise awareness, to try to transmit these values of struggle”, he says.
if in Pride was the union of the miners and the LGTBI collective, in I am madly loving you It shows the surprising support of a small part of the Andalusian church, linked to the workers’ struggle, and which helped the organization by creating spaces and supporting its beginnings. Alejandro Marín makes it very clear that they have counted “the exception”. “It was not an intention to whitewash the Church at all, because they have been one of the worst enemies that the group has ever had. That is one thing we know, but it is true that the exception was so beautiful…”, he adds and values the work of those people who in the “anti-Franco struggle were close to those who needed it most”. For Marín, the response in theaters matters less than what they are experiencing in previous screenings, where people are thanking them for the film and there are mothers who approach Ana Wagener to tell her that they have experienced the same thing. Cinema that talks about us, that looks to the past to project optimism towards a future that cannot take steps back.
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