When C. Tangana meets the flamenco guitarist Yerai Cortés, he is impressed by his music and his uniqueness. He asks him about his project and he tells him about an album. Although it is a guitar album, this album tells his life story, is about his family, and, in particular, about a sorrow, a sorrow that he wants to tell the world about. This resulted in La guitarra flamenca de Yerai Cortés the debut film by
(better known musically as C. Tangana). Titled like that album, it stars Cortés himself and has been selected as the opening film in the New Directors section of the 72nd San Sebastian International Film Festival.
Far from the classic documentary storytelling, Álvarez himself takes part in several of the conversations throughout the film. La guitarra flamenca de Yerai Cortés tells the story of the musician’s family, the twisted relationships between them, their past and their present, their struggles together, alone and against each other, their ghosts, their unresolved wounds and traumas, their silences, their sadness and secret joys. In this journey of recording the album, the director and his protagonist delve into an artistic process where Cortés confronts this personal history full of darkness through which he tries to redeem his relationship with his parents. The result is a film that also manages to transcend the personal to touch on the complexity of human relationships, of the setbacks of love, of how two people who once loved each other can become complete strangers years later, of the desire and the difficulty of loving and being loved, of everything that makes up our identity, of how we become who we are and the price we pay for it, of the tears and frustrations we carry with us throughout our lives, of the passing of time, of the impossibility of forgetting, of that past that remains in us and what we do with it. Also, of art as a chance to heal, of its capacity to express that darkness that inhabits us, of what drives us to tell our stories.
The director tells this family story in a moving way. It is touching to see how he explores and narrates all this intimacy through the testimonies of its protagonists and their environment, their voices, their words, their ways of speaking, their contrasting memories. The images capture what they were yesterday and what they are now, the music accompanies them and also becomes another narrator (there are truly overwhelming and moving musical sequences). But this way of narrating also reflects the vision and the personality of a director, and of wanting to tell the story in a specific way. The film has a precise character of its own. And this is one of its great virtues. Antón Álvarez’s debut film manages to have a style, a sensitivity, a tone, a time, textures and colours (the decision to shoot in 16mm and some musical sequences in 35mm has a lot to do with achieving this style). All this make it unique and give it that sombre beauty, with moments of great visual and emotional strength, deeply heartbreaking and also of a certain light in spite of the latent pain.
La guitarra flamenca de Yerai Cortés is C. Tangana’s dazzling and powerful directorial debut. A film about a family’s rifts that manages to go beyond the usual documentary to reflect the beauty and pain that often exist in human relationships. A film with soul, which, at times, manages to unite the magic of cinema with that of music, with images to remember.