- The 70th edition of the festival hosts the world premiere of Rafael Cobos’s first feature film, Golpes, a combination of the adventures of quinqui cinema and political commitment that addresses the open wounds of Spanish society.
- Accompanying the filmmaker were actors Jesús Carroza, Luis Tosar and Teresa Garzón, screenwriter Fernando Navarro and producers Emma Lustres and Borja Pena (Vaca Films).
The 70th edition of the Valladolid International Film Festival (SEMINCI) has premiered Golpes, the first film by Rafael Cobos (winner of two Goya awards for best screenplay for Marshland and The Man with a Thousand Faces), a tense tale of robberies that revisits the history of the Spanish Transition through two brothers, one a policeman and the other a thief, played by Luis Tosar and Jesús Carroza.
With this film, Cobos returns to Seville in the 1980s, a place he has already worked on as a screenwriter for filmmaker Alberto Rodríguez, in films such as Unit 7 (2012) and Marshland (2014). On his first experience directing solo after the success of the series El hijo zurdo (2023), the filmmaker admitted: ‘I’m probably a more honest screenwriter now. We always cheat, we don’t know how to solve things, and literature allows us to pass the responsibility on to the director.’
Written together with screenwriter Fernando Navarro (Verónica, Saturn Return), the director shared that Golpes stems from his interest in telling an unconventional story about robbers, which was then enriched with a profound commentary on Spanish historical memory: ‘This approach is part of the way Fernando and I understand cinema; seeking to forge a metaphor to approach that untold history: The Transition has been depicted many times in cinema, but not so much its consequences, those open questions that were never fully answered. In this film, we find an interesting combination of the adventures of quinqui cinema and a film loaded with political commitment.’
Challenging the crime genre
Golpes tells the unique story of two brothers, weighed down by the death of their father at the hands of the Civil Guard during the war. Rafael Cobos subverts the codes of crime cinema by turning the frenetic pace typical of quinqui cinema into a story with a more twilight tone. ‘The intention was not for the film to follow a canon; from the outset, we wanted something very emotional that came from the characters, with a very dry mise-en-scène that would allow us to focus on the conflicts and develop the story from them,’ explained the filmmaker.
In this sense, the music by the artist Bronquio has played a fundamental role in this attempt to challenge the expectations of the genre, as the screenwriter explained: ‘The music plays against the images, it is very disruptive and unexpected, but also emotional, playing with that playful component typical of crime films.’
Supporting cast
Luis Tosar (winner of three Goya awards for best actor) plays one of the brothers, the policeman Sabino, a character about whom he says: ‘He is very familiar to me, I recognise him in my father and my uncles, he is strangely very close to me. He is part of those generations that lived through the Transition and now it is his turn to take on a changing reality with very few tools to do so.’
‘We have made little progress in terms of historical memory. In this country, we are always divided into two camps, and here you see it in the same family, where there are two totally antagonistic ways of understanding life,’ added Tosar, emphasising the film’s desire to address the open wounds that Spanish society continues to carry.
The rest of the cast spoke of the complicity needed to tackle a story of this kind, especially given the romantic relationship between the characters played by Jesús Carroza (Goya Award for Best New Actor for 7 Virgins in 2006) and Teresa Garzón: ‘When she sees him for the first time, it’s as if she already knows Migueli; she is aware of the legend in the neighbourhood and admires him, she knows that he has a past that she does not know well. They both see a future in each other,’ said the actress from Granada, who makes her debut in this film.