Good Valley Stories
Historias del buen valle- SPAIN, FRANCE / 2025 / Spanish / Color, B&W / DCP / 122 min
Director, Script, Editing: José Luis Guerin
Photography: Alicia Almiñana
Art Direction: Clara Serrano
Sound Design: Maximiliano Martínez
Music: Anahit Simonian
Producers: Javier Lafuente, Jonás Trueba, Gaëlle Jones, José Luis Guerin
World Sales: Shellac Films
In the Vallbona neighborhood, on the outskirts of Barcelona, families who moved here in the middle of the 20th Century co-exist with young generations of immigrants who have come from every corner of the world in recent years. Cut off from the surrounding area by motorways and railroads, left behind by development—here, people grow vegetables and flowers, sing and dance, and swim in waterways where it is forbidden. This film, shot over three years with the residents, layers and filters the shadows of various lives and histories through one another, all while resolutely depicting the circumstances of our ever-changing modern world.
[Director’s Statement] After some initial observational shoots in Super 8, I organized a casting as a way to approach the diverse human landscape of this outlying district at the transition between the rural and urban worlds. In those conversations I was told repeatedly that I had come too late, that the neighborhood’s story was already something of the past.
Clearly they were referring to the epic when migrants were settling in these suburbs, building clandestinely, at night, the shacks that would form a spontaneous urban area totally devoid of any institutional planning. A history that, with slight variations, is repeated on the outskirts of large cities: clandestinity, flooding, struggles for water, electricity, sewage, schools, transportation . . .
I assumed that the lack of perspective with regard to the present prevented them from recognizing a possible relation with the Vallbona of the 21st century, a soundbox of the global village—there are as many as 12 languages in the film—.
I needed to meet the looks that would give meaning to this landscape, still formless, under construction, and to see through their eyes: from the philosophies and suspicions of an ancestral pagesía, from the legacy of a grandfather in his village in India, from the drums of a Guinean river, from a dark Ukrainian wood . . . I had to convoke these collective imaginations in order to project a fair image, to overlap them with the physical landscape at hand, molding its identity in constant movement. An identity that is forever a work in progress.
José Luis Guerin
As a director and screenwriter, he has combined fiction and documentary, blurring the boundaries between the two genres. His films include Innisfree (1990), Train of Shadows (1997), Work in Progress (2001), In the City of Sylvia (2007), and The Academy of Muses (2015). He has presented his films at festivals such as Venice, Cannes, Berlin, and San Sebastián. He is perhaps one of the most critically acclaimed and popular Spanish filmmakers at international festivals.