THE BOY IN THE FILM IS ME
father says the best years of his life were when he lived in Switzerland, from 1960 to 1966. Living there opened our eyes and it was very hard when we came back. Those were difficult years: my father and his friend were very good mechanics at Spain´s best factory, but they didn´t have their own home. We lived with my grandparents in the basement apartment because my grandparents worked there as the superintendents of that apartment building in the Argüelles neighborhood of Madrid.
A superintendent looks after the building, keeps it clean, delivers mail, and keeps an eye on comings and goings. In Madrid they often have an apartment in the building as part of their pay
After my father left, my mother took me on a train, we spent many hours standing in a compartment and then we arrived at a garden! I left the basement and I saw a wonderful place with a river and woods where I rode my bicycle in the summer I shot some scenes in the film at the house where I grew up and today, when you open the windows, the landscape is the same one I saw as a boy.
From the start, we learned that
”what belongs to everyone is more mine than what is mine”, and I can´t forget it.
When I returned to Madrid I had arguments with other boys. They said babies were born... through the navel! We had sexual education at school. Switzerland had nudist lakes, dances where women chose their partners.
I was happy to return to Spain where my family lived-grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc. But once I got there, it was traumatic, I didn´t want to stay in Spain and I missed my Swiss friends a lot.
When I wrote the screenplay for this film, I told myself that because we came to Spain I became an actor, a writer and a director. Then I told a story of that beautiful land and of the tenderness and the humanity of those years there with my parents.