Alba Flores, Nairobi in “Money Heist,” and Spanish Academy Goya new actor nominees La Dani and Julio Hu Chen, are attached to star in Cande Lázaro’s “The Shepherdess,” a potential standout at this year’s Locarno Match Me! co-production forum.
Flores also starred as Saray Vargas in women’s penitentiary-set international breakout “Locked Up.”
La Dani, a non-binary singer and now actor, won his 2024 Goya nomination for “Love & Revolution,” well received by critics; Spaniard Hu Chen’s nomination at the same Goya awards came for “Chinas,” where his role and performance bucked stock stereotypes of Chinese immigrants in Spain. He was one of the first Spanish actors of Chinese descent to score an Academy nomination.
This keynote of inclusivity runs through “The Shepherdess.”
A fiction feature, it resurrects the figure of intersexual maqui Florenci Pla and establishes a dialog between him and Cande Lázaro, the film’s director, who in the film is undergoing his medical and administrative transition.
Selected for the 2024 edition of San Sebastian’s Ikusmira Berriak, one of Spain’s most prestigious development programs, “The Shepherdess” is also the first time in Spain that a production and directing team – producer Charli Bujosa Cortés at Spain’s Mansalva Films and director Lázaro – is made up of two non-binary trans people who come together to tell a story that starts from a real historical figure, Bujosa noted.
Pla was a victim of his times. Born intersexual in 1917, Pla was baptised a girl and sent to the hills in Eastern Spain to look after sheep. After the husband of the owner of the estate he worked for is arrested, tortured and executed and Pla is stripped naked by a Civil Guard to mock his genitalia, Pla joined the maqui, who fought against Franco’s security forces during the first 15 years of the Spanish post-Civil War.
Transforming into a man – an identity he always wanted – he fought for 18 months, being stigmatized as a monster by Franco’s propaganda regime, a bogey woman, La Pastora, who ate children, according to popular legend.
“The Shepherdess,” however, is no stock bio. In it, the life stories of Pla and director Lázaro intertwine, “making Florenci able to move through space-time as he pleases; between the mountain and the city, between the past and the present, living at the same time his years with the maquis” and Lázaro’s transition,” a synopsis runs.
Lázaro will also play Pla. The two characters exchange will turn almost inevitably in part about their experiences around identity. Bujosa is keen to emphasize, however, that the film is “not heavy drama. There’s a playful element to it.”
Also, this is a de-dramatizing vision of intersexuality. “We all live in the world. We share spaces. We receive violence but we also receive love. Everything’s simpler than it looks. That’s something which is important which the film says,” the producer added.
Nor do Lázaro and Bujosa want to make a film that is black-and-white.
Captured and imprisoned from 1960 to 1977 for 29 murders carried out by the maquis before he joined them, Pla was liberated in 1977 as part of a general amnesty and taken in by the family of a prison guard. He is now rehabilitated as a hero of the Spanish resistance, a street in his native village named after him.
“We don’t want to say that the present is better than the past, nor cities better than villages. In both spaces and both times there were and are good times. When Florenci joined the maqui as a man, people more or less said ‘O.K.’ Now we have to explain everything 4,000 times.”
The key to Pla’s life is just how totally comprehensible and very human were his life decisions, which he explained with total naturalness in the few interviews he gave.
“We appropriate Florenci’s story in our own way, without great drama. We don’t want queer to be niche. At Mansalva Films, we aim to achieve general audience distribution openings,” Bujosa explained.