At the age of four, Pau García moved to Aben al Abbar street in València. The year was 1974 and his father had been appointed clinical head of women’s ward number 9 of the newly opened Bétera psychiatric hospital. Listed by Franco as the “largest in Europe”, the center had 12 buildings, large dining rooms and even a hotel. The regime was trying to wash its image after the harsh images of the Father Jofré psychiatric hospital (popularly known as the Jesús asylum) came to light, in which, for more than 40 years, around 1,500 people had been locked up.
Pau García tells La Vanguardia that his father was one of those who managed to enter Jesús infiltrated as a Red Cross volunteer and there he discovered many people, highly medicated, sharing the same room, on a straw floor and defecating in the same room. space without any privacy.
More than a hundred of these women imprisoned in Jesús arrived by buses to pavilion 9 of Bétera, where Ramón García and a young team of professionals tried to give them back their identity and a contact with society that was stolen from them after years of confinement and mistreatment. . Childhood memories of those meetings of these specialists who wanted to break the walls and return the mentally ill to the real world are revived years later.
The story of these women who even lost their names and the work of professionals such as Ramón García, María Huertas, Camila Ortega, Evelia Castillo, Enrique Jordà or Cándido Polo, among many others, to reconnect them with the present (but also with their past) become a short film that Pau García himself will present at the end of March.
Looking for my own name, filmed in the old Santa Lucía de Alzira hospital and in the Tarragona municipality of Miravet, is inspired by the book Nine Names, from the Temporal publishing house that María Huertas, Ramón’s partner in Bétera, wrote in 2021 to tell her experience dealing with these women who had not only lost their lives, but also the memory of having them.
In the short, explains the filmmaker Pau García, actresses who “have deep mental suffering” such as Paloma Rubio, Fina Gallart, Ana Bas or Aure Lerma have participated. “All of them have shown us great artistic resources,” emphasizes the director of the documentary, who recalls the emotionality of the filming: “The filming team has cried a lot, every day, two or three times; I have been making films since 1998 and it has never happened to me.” Pau highlights the effort and quality of the technical team and talks about the work, among others, of Andreu Signes or Santi Navalón, a Valencian musician who accompanied Presuntos implicados and whose music will be part of the soundtrack created by Tere Nuñez
The film, says Pau García, narrates that journey of accompaniment by professionals so that women can reunite with their lives. Stories like that of a woman who married a Civil Guard and, after a few first years of happiness, she found herself immersed in an ordeal of abuse and beatings. In the midst of Franco’s regime, no one supported her and she ended up trying to commit suicide in the port of Valencia with one of her children in her arms. They were both saved, but she was locked up in the Jesus asylum.
There, explains the director, people were also locked up who had entered without any illness – for more political or social reasons – and who “after 30-40 years without contact with the outside world were showing the consequences.” He explains that in Jesus there were hardly any histories or reports and the documentation was little or not detailed at all. “Some of the women didn’t even speak and most didn’t communicate with each other.” In fact, the great work of that young team of professionals was precisely to trace the memories of the hospitalized people and restore their contact with the real world.
It was not an easy task because in the Bétera psychiatric hospital itself, not all professionals shared that same view and there were some who argued that these people had to be locked up for life. For this reason, he points out, they never understood experiences such as taking artists from the Crónica team to the psychiatric hospital to paint one of the pavilions or the walking excursion to the town of Bétera to the rhythm of a group of Danish clowns with the idea that people would see with other eyes to those within the hospital walls. It cannot be forgotten that the construction of the center was not at all well received by the residents of this municipality in the metropolitan area of ??Valencia.
However, the short film is just one of the proposals of this global project – which seeks crowdfunding until next January 1 – and which is a co-production between Producciones Doble Banda and Los Sueños de la Hormiga Roja, with the support of the Alzira City Council. , from the Miravet City Council and the AFARADEM association, which works with people who have mental suffering, as well as their families and friends. The Institute of Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts (ICAA, dependent on the Ministry of Culture), the Institut València de Cultura (IVC), the Institut Català de les Empreses Culturals (ICEC) and the Valencian public television also participate in the initiative. Punt.
The idea is also to hold a photographic exhibition by the prestigious portraitist of filmmakers Óscar Fernández Orengo, who for a few days lived with the filming crew and has captured a whole series of portraits of the actresses and actors and also of the professionals who They worked at Bétera in the seventies and early eighties and who, together with the women interns, are the inspirations for this project.
We also want to organize and expand the documentation on Bétera. “In 2010, taking advantage of my father’s 70th birthday party, which brought together many of the professionals of the time, I started filming conversations,” says Pau García. Now, the idea is to store these talks on a website free access in which anyone can access those materials.”
Finally, they want to lay the foundations to produce a series whose starting point is María Huertas’ book Nine Names. In fact, Producciones Doble Banda already has the option to purchase the rights to the book to be able to make said series, and the filmmaker says that they had to hurry because there was another production company interested, but the author preferred that the project remain in hands of the filmmaker who, from a young age, internalized the efforts of her and that team of young professionals to break taboos and restore the names of hundreds of women.
