RenterÃa, summer of 1976. Bea is 15 years old. Her father is in jail and her mother works as a maid at the home of a wealthy lady whose granddaughter, Miren, has a problem. Bea and Miren become friends and join a group of women fighting to get abortion legalized in Spain. SÃlvia Munt directs Las buenas compañÃas, a film based on true events and starring Elena Tarrats and Alicia Falcó, which is now hitting Spanish screens. In this interview with La Vanguardia, the director explains the ins and outs of filming.
How did the idea of ​​writing and directing this film come about?
The idea came from Jorge Gil Munárriz, who co-wrote the script and who had been shooting a short about these women from RenterÃa, who exist and are now 60 years old. Gil suggested that I make a film about that experience. We started writing in February 2020 when the world stopped.
How did you build the character of Bea?
Bea opened up to life when everything was bursting, at a time when they took to the streets again. I also had my own experience. I was 17 years old then and I saw many things. In addition, the real protagonists explained their experiences to us. Good company is Bea’s look in a summer that changed her as a person, when she learned about the reality of abortion and the struggle and fell in love with it. I also lived my own reality at home with a mother who was silent and an idealized father who was not there.
The film is a tribute to mothers…
Yes, and a tribute to my mother, who lived through a terrible upbringing, who suffered an abortion and until the end of her days had a feeling of guilt. I found out very late, because this type of situation happened in solitude. You had to be a warrior in silence. The last Nobel laureate for literature, Annie Ernaux, tells it very well in The Event.
That 70’s society that he portrays in Good Companies is terrible for women with impunity for rapists and child abusers, with abusive husbands…
That society, timid and fearful, protected the rapist. It is worth knowing because the present comes from a past that must be told. Now we are beginning to reap the fruits of a fight that was complicated, because before it was fought and things did not change. Bea is the guiding thread of this story of three women who suffer adultery, abortion or abuse in silence and the shame of everything that happened to them is carried in silence.
How was that fight?
It started with 11 women from Basauri who were sentenced to 14 years in prison. At that time, you could be put in jail for having an abortion. The struggle lasted three years, there was a lot of demand in the street. It also happened in Barcelona and Madrid, but the high point was these women who helped each other, took to the streets and came out of obscurantism. The mothers lived between their education and the adolescents, who did not want to know anything about it.
But now things have improved…
Yes, here where public health responds, but it is a reality that continues to happen in other places, such as in the United States. Nothing is guaranteed. Everything can return to the channels of secrecy and religion. Although something has improved, because we are beginning to see that the world is made up of that half of women, that a balance of salaries and more justice is in sight and that, for the first time, stalkers and rapists are being persecuted. At least now, society has left the law of silence. That has been in the last decade, but much remains to be done.
