It was actually Joaquín Sabida’s idea. The singer and Fernando León de Aranoa have known each other for more than 20 years, they are friends. And about 13 years ago Sabina asked the filmmaker to record her. “Joaquín and the poet Benjamín Prado were composing the themes of Vinegar and Roses. They wrote in the car. I thought it was a good idea to join him on his trip, so I sat in the back seat with the camera and shot his discussion about how the lyrics for Cristales de Bohemia should be, ”recalls León de Aranoa.
The director was not aware then that he had become involved in a very long story that would take him to distant places, such as Sabina’s tour in Mexico, and to the recesses of the singer’s soul. It has been 13 years of sporadic filming that have culminated in Feeling it a lot, a documentary that covers Sabina and which has premiered at the Velodrome of this San Sebastian Festival.
For León de Aranoa the experience has been something different, used to shooting his fiction films where everything is scheduled, getting on Sabida’s bandwagon has been a useful lesson in improvisation: “There was no plan, so the unpredictable arose, things happened without being planned, there was no daily life and, furthermore, it was a discontinuous shoot. Thanks to that, I have obtained many treasures that I already wanted to show.”
Treasures such as the bullfight of José Tomás in the Mexican plaza of Aguascalientes in April 2010. Sabina, an inveterate bullfighter, “stopped his Mexican tour to go see his friend Tomás fight with the idea that that night the bullfighter would go to his concert. It was something like an artistic exchange. It was the first afternoon of bullfighting for León de Aranoa: “Sabina calls me the Swede, because I don’t understand anything about bullfighting.”
But from that ignorance, the director records the teacher’s nervous face before jumping into the ring. Then he focuses on the first task. Tomás gives Sabina a bull, who enjoys the show in the stands. The camera returns to the arena and, suddenly, the bull grabs Tomás. León de Aranoa has kept these overwhelming images for years, which are now finally seeing the light of day.
Feeling it a lot also goes through Sabina’s childhood and adolescence in her native Ubeda through a tribute that the city paid to the singer and that was attended by the director and his camera. The documentary also walks through the concert that Sabina offered in Madrid in 2020 with Joan Manuel Serrat, due to the nerves prior to going on stage, due to her remembered fall that in the end resulted in a scare, due to her moments of revelry with colleagues from the band before quitting drugs…
“It is a bare, non-geographical story where Sabina’s humor and wisdom appear, where her talent is perceived, but her vulnerability and fears also appear. The character does not hide, he presents himself as he is, because thanks to this unusual way of shooting I have had the opportunity to share my proximity with him”, says the director in a conversation with La Vanguardia.
León de Aranoa is aware that this work could have been endless. He decided to end it after the pandemic and did so with a long conversation with Sabina at the singer’s house in Madrid. A talk that drips throughout the documentary and that serves the director to prop up the character Sabina, the internationally famous singer with a contagious laugh.
Point and end for a long and atypical work. León de Aranoa considers himself “privileged” for having been able to shoot this documentary and “having attended some of the moments seen in the film”, but now he is “wanting to return to fiction”.
