13. Sucia (Bàrbara Mestanza & Marc Pujolar, 2026) (with Duncan Wheeler)

I mean, Sucia emerges at a moment of intense debate in Spain regarding sexual violence, the justice system, and the limits of representation.

Could you talk to us a little bit about some of the moments, the milestones that have taken place in Spanish popular culture? I mean, I think

there's a series of milestones.

I mean, what it reminds me of in many ways, and obviously they're very different things, different phenomenon, but I think the kind of the media and social response or our analogies is I remember when suddenly in the early 2000s, domestic violence or gender-based violence in Spain just became this huge media topic.

You couldn't open a paper or put on the news without hearing about it.

And I think it's obviously not that suddenly sexual, you know, sexual abuse, sexual attacks have begun.

Suddenly there's an epidemic of it.

What I think has happened is it's less of a taboo subject and people are beginning to talk about it.

And what was a widespread social acceptance movement amongst most, maybe not all Spaniards, but this is unacceptable.

And I think there's a sense in which the law and lawmakers are perhaps behind sobriety in this regard.

And it's one of the things about Spain having a penal code rather than working on a case law basis.

What that means is, is that things take longer to change.

And there's been a number of cases of quite elderly, often quite elderly judges, you know, using not just making questionable judgments, but also expressing it in questionable language.

I think the big kind of social change or social pivoting moment was in 2016 when there was a awful gang rape in Pamplona, which then kind of became a media issue, not just for the event, but also on how it was treated through a judiciary.

So I was actually in Pamplona just when the case was coming to trial, and I met up with a number of the lawyers who were working on the case.

And they were saying to me, this isn't actually the first case of this kind that documented actually a very similar case in Valencia.

But they said, what is different is that actually because of Nevada, where Pamplona is for historical reasons, has a very strong civil society.

They were like, actually, this is becoming, this is becoming, entering into and becoming an issue of public debate.

And I think Soucia has very much, you know, it's interesting that the assault happened in 2015.

I think actually if this film had come out in 2015, well, obviously it wouldn't be the same film because the film documents a response, you know, the kind of her attempt, Barbara's attempts to, legally and psychologically come to terms with the assault, I don't think it would have had the same repercussion it has now.

The story in and of itself is traumatic and terrible, but I think it's chiming in with a broader social conversation and suggestion that Spanish society is perhaps at a crossroads in this regard.

Yeah, and maybe we should just say the obvious before we go any further, that we are two white Westerners in the British higher education system talking about this film, which is about a woman's experience of sexual assault.

I'm

glad you said that.

I was thinking of bringing that up at another point in a different way.