Marshland 2014

Marshland | La isla mínima

Marshland-La isla minima

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About the Marshland 💬

• Fear runs deep.

The Spanish deep South, 1980. During the annual festivities, in a forgotten town on the Guadalquivir Marshes, two teenage girls disappear. Juan Robles (Javier Gutiérrez) and Pedro Suárez (Raúl Arévalo), two homicide detectives from Madrid with deep divisions in their ideology, are sent to assist the local police with the investigation. They must put aside their differences to untangle a web of intrigue, fed by secrets and lies which the locals refuse to give up. With their careers at stake and before more victims are claimed, time is running out to solve the case and face whoever has terrorized the community for years.

• DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

THE GENESIS

MARSHLAND began some years ago, in a photographic exhibition I attended with Alex Catalán, director of photography and a good friend. Atín Aya, the photographer from Seville, had devoted himself to capturing the last vestiges of a style of life that existed in the marshlands of the Guadalquivir river for centuries. Many of the photographs were portraits of the locals and showed a mixture of resignation, mistrust and hardness which were part of those faces frozen in the past and that, with the mechanization of the labor, most likely wouldn't have much of a future. The exhibition was a reflection of the end of an era, an epoch. That was my first contact with La Isla, the sunset for a landscape fit for a Western of the end of the century.

For some months during 2009, Rafael Cobos and I toyed with the possibility of writing a ''noir'' story, having as inspiration Bolaño's novel ''2666'' and films such as Vajda's THE BAIT, or others like: MYSTERY OF MURDERS, CHINATOWN, BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK, etc. As a source of inspiration, we also had everything the marshlands evoked in us and a magic and mysterious place where wealth and power lived shoulder to shoulder with the pain and misery of characters resulting from a social and political past. With all that information we began to write a story. We decided to set it in 1980, a year of great political tension in Spain, a tension which had to be perceived in the background, as one perceives the gnawing of teeth.

THE SHOOT

The marshlands always appeared to us to be an immense, tough territory; magnetic but truly inhospitable and cruel. And that's exactly what it was.

It was a difficult movie to make; very physical for each and every one of the members of the crew. The rice crop forced us to start filming early. The weather showed all its extremes with maximum temperatures of 42ºC in late summer and lows of -2ºC. towards the end of November. Every step we took, because of the vastness of the territory involved, became a logistical nightmare.

THE CAST

I think what I am most proud of is to have managed to keep all actors protected from the ''harshness'' of the shoot, just one of the enormous difficulties which we faced daily. I am really satisfied with the work done by Raúl and Javier: the effort, the intensity during rehearsals, and their concentration and creativity in playing their roles. I think the result of the acting is fantastic. I have mentioned Raúl and Javier but the rest of the etc.

THE PLOT

MARSHLAND is fiction from beginning to end. The film delves into the disappearance of two girls. Finding missing persons continues to be one the most common jobs homicide investigators undertake. Even today it is still one of their main jobs: to try and find human beings who have vanished, following the trail as if they were ghosts. The idea was to create the events in the film based on the day to day routine of cops nearly forty years ago. And thanks to the advice of two policemen still in service, we managed lots of research on a first-hand basis which helped to construct the plot. That's how we came to know that police methods have changed enormously with the years; before, investigations were far less scientific, there were far less available means, in some cases, no means at all (several policemen told us - after reading the script - that it was strange that each cop would have his own room in a motel, that it was considered a waste of resources...).

In the end, we had a strong plot that carried the story with strength and we needed to integrate the characters more, so we decided to draw from real events which took place in those years. In the case of Pedro's character, we used the real story of a policeman who was admonished and retired from his post just because he expressed his repulsion towards some of the military who were in favor of an overthrow of the government. We must not forget the story takes place in 1980.

In the end, MARSHLAND is a film with a classical touch, as far as the investigation and the development of the characters but with a background that is murky, muddy, dense and impenetrable... as the very marshlands where it takes place. MARSHLAND is where I've come closest to making a genre film but at the same time, it has its own identity which makes it different, special.

Marshland Movie Details 🎥

Directed by

Alberto Rodríguez

Writing Credits

Alberto Rodríguez

Rafael Cobos

Starring

Raúl Arévalo

Javier Gutiérrez

Antonio de la Torre

Nerea Barros

Salva Reina

Jesús Castro

Manolo Solo

María Varod

Perico Cervantes

Ana Tomeno

Beatriz Cotobal

Jesús Ortiz

Jesús Carroza

Ángela Vega

Laura López

Julián Candón

Jorge Amat

Cyntia Suano

Miguel Ángel Díaz

Adelfa Calvo

Francisco García

Lola Páez

Juan Carlos Villanueva

Pedro Lanzas

Juan Carlos Montilla

Alberto González

Manuel Salas

Cecilia Villanueva

Music by

Julio de la Rosa

Cinematography by

Alex Catalán

Category: EFA, European Film Award Winner

Genres: Action, Crime, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

Country: Spain

Marshland Official Trailer

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