When Isaki Lacuesta was young he practiced cultural journalism. He wrote about music and cinema for the Diari de Girona and “it was a great advantage to work for a local newspaper because I could do whatever I wanted, although, I don’t know why, I never had the opportunity to interview Los Planetas.”
That does not mean that he did not like the music of the Granada band. She loved it. “A year before making the film, I spent the day playing one of her songs to the point that my wife warned me that she might hate them,” recalls the filmmaker.
But that did not happen and Lacuesta has filmed Second Prize, the great film about Los Planetas (which is not a film about Los Planetas). A film that won the Biznaga de Oro at the Malaga Festival, which is touring half the world and which today hits Spanish screens.
It is not a film about Los Planetas “because I did not want to film the classic biopic, a literal film about the life of a group in exchange for getting permission for the songs,” the director, who has co-directed, says in an interview with La Vanguardia. the film with Pol Rodríguez. Second prize is a different biography, which collects traces of what the band was in the 90s with a new and impressive aesthetic that leaves its mark wherever it goes.
At the beginning of the nineties in Granada, Jota, Florent and May founded the group Los Planetas, an indie rock music band that immediately stood out. May, who because of his shyness always played with his back to the audience, left the group to return to university and the two boys suffered a crisis when they were left alone.
Second Prize (which is not a film about Los Planetas) is a story of friendship, drugs and music, which traces the future of the group from May’s abandonment to the recording in New York of the band’s most successful album, Una week in the engine of a bus (1998).
Lacuesta wrote the script with Fernando Navarro, who in the 90s “was a waiter in the bars where they played, where they drank, where Los Planetas lived.” Navarro’s memories were added to the interviews that the members of the group had given, to all their videos and concerts and to “the oral legend, to the adventures that the people of Granada tell about Los Planetas, because in Granada everyone knows them and there are always a story to tell.”
Scraps of stories and chords that have become a very unique film crowned by a different aesthetic because “we were looking for a different and sophisticated image that moved away from that homogeneity that runs through the series on the platforms, the video clips or the mobile and mobile recordings. “We invented a series of filters that transform colors and that can no longer be corrected in post-production.”
Second Prize, the title of one of the songs by Los Planetas, is a film “for fans of the band, for those who only knew them by hearsay and for the public who did not know of their existence. For young people, it’s a retro sci-fi movie in which people smoke in bars, put a needle in a round thing to listen to music, and put a coin in a booth to talk on the phone.
A film that joins others that also look nostalgically at the music of the 90s perhaps “because enough time has passed to have a perspective and be able to tell stories aimed at those who lived through that time and also at young people,” he indicates. Lacuesta, whose Second Prize is added to other recently released titles such as La Estrella Azul, Disco Ibiza Locomía or Por tus Muertos.
Tapes that have the world of music and drugs in common. “Jota said that A week in the engine of a bus is a conceptual album about a person who is abandoned by his place and, as life is unpleasant and hard, he finds refuge in art and drugs and each song represents the transit for a drug,” says Lacuesta.
Mauricio Aznar, leader of the Zaragoza band Más Birras, died in 2000 as a result of an overdose. Aznar, played by Pepe Lorente, is the protagonist of La Estrella Azul, a musical directed by Javier Macipe.
Mauricio has always admired Atahualpa Yupanqui. Now, in the late 90s, he has become a famous rocker in Spain, but he is hooked on heroin and has problems with his girlfriend. So he decides to travel to Argentina to see the land of Yupanqui. He arrives in Santiago del Estero and settles in the house of Carlos Carvajal, with whom he learns the rhythms of the chacarera and the secrets of the guitar. A delicious film with a lot of music to discover.
Music and drugs also marked the short and complex, although very successful, existence of the group Locomía in the early 90s. “I met Locomía when I was a child, I was not a particularly fan of the group, but I was a fan of the time. When about four years ago I read an article in the press about its intrastory, I understood that there was a film there,” explains Kike Maíllo, director of Disco Ibiza Locomía, which premiered last week, to La Vanguardia.
The film begins when Xavi Font goes to live in Ibiza at the end of the 80s. He wanted to be a clothing designer, but his exotic models with wide shoulder pads and lots of color inspired by dragons did not quite have an outlet. He was accompanied on his Ibizan adventure by his best friend, Lourdes, and his partner, Manolo. The trio didn’t have a penny, but they soon discovered a way to have fun: they settled in a farmhouse in the countryside and set up a kind of commune where they made their designs and organized endless parties.
It didn’t take long for luck to smile on them. The KU nightclub, the best in the world at that time, hired them to set the scene for its endless night. The group, which had grown with the addition of Jaume, Carlos and Luis, Xavi’s little brother, had an ace up their sleeve: they danced to the rhythm of huge fans dressed in the striking designs created by Xavi. They were so successful that even Freddie Mercury paid homage to them.
“In Locomía there was a touch of tackyness and also some genius. They took themselves very seriously. They had a brutal impact in Mexico and Argentina where they were big stars. I was interested in the internal fight, the fight for success and their loss when they were at the top and also the theme of the chosen families, that group of uprooted people who in Ibiza find a bubble of freedom,” explains Maíllo, who wanted to capture in the film “a whirlwind of events with different tones within the emotion of moving from comedy to melodrama so that it could be seen as a journey, which is very filmic.”