The first person convicted of the 11-M attacks was a minor. Gabriel Montoya Vidal, baby, was 15 years old when he met Emilio Suárez Trashorras on the streets of Avilés and 16 when he was transporting explosives from Asturias to Madrid in a backpack. In just a few months, he was smoking joints with his friends on the porch of his house and was involved in the largest jihadist attack on European territory. Twenty years after the tragedy that claimed 193 lives, the series “See You in Another Life” (premiering Wednesday the 6th on Disney+) tells its story and brings to the screen the testimonies of the victims of that tragedy.
Alberto and Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo (Crematorio, La zona) are the creators of this six-part production about the Asturian plot of 11-M, which draws on two fundamental sources. The most important of these is the book “See You in This Life or the Other (Planet)”, published in 2016 by EL PAÍS journalist Manuel Jabois with his interview with Gabriel Montoya Vidal. The other great source is the 2007 summary of the 11M Macro trial. One of the authors' main concerns was how victims would receive their proposal. For this reason and because of the complexity of filming, the preparation of this series was kept secret. “We didn't want to reconstruct the attack, but that the victims, with their statements in the macro trial, should be the ones who tell what happened. We wanted them to be the first to see it and that there were no leaks,” explains Alberto Sánchez- Cabezudo. “We had the same goal, which was to tell what happened and to present the story of the events as they occurred and as they were proven in a macro process,” adds his brother Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo.
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“See You in Another Life” begins with the story of some neighborhood criminals, but thanks to various time jumps, the viewer knows that the fate of these stray bullets will be tied to tragedy. The bombs of March 11, 2004 fly over the plot like an unstoppable fate that the characters are heading towards. Jabois came to Baby's story through a contact made at El Mundo, where he worked in 2014. At the time, he tried to interview him on the tenth anniversary of the attacks, but Gabriel Montoya Vidal turned him down.
Alberto Sánchez-Cabezudo, Manuel Jabois and Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo, at one point during the filming of the series. Guillermo Gumiel (Disney+)
When the journalist was already working at EL PAÍS, Baby contacted him himself. “I feared that the story would be exculpatory and that I would focus on a person who was convicted of 3/11 and say that others were to blame and whitewash it. But that didn’t happen, he was very honest,” Jabois remembers. Regarding his story, the journalist was interested in the speed with which everything happened, “how in October 2003 he was a normal guy on a street in Avilés, with a broken family and precarious circumstances, and within a few months on one Street landed bank like the first defendant from 11-M.” The book had previously interested others in adapting it. And the Sánchez-Cabezudos had been after him for years. The deal that made this transformation a reality was completed just three years ago.
The book and series share a stern and raw tone in the narrative, with a deliberate distancing to avoid judgment and moral lessons. “How do we follow someone who we know has committed something so terrible? We can’t prejudge him, but we also don’t want the viewer to continue to empathize with him,” reflects Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo. To maintain balance in this direction, both the script and the camera follow Baby closely to show his development and foreshadow the future, with jumps in time to his future interview with Jabois and overlays of moments from the trial that will take place in the finale The focus is part of the series.
Pol López as Emilio Trashorras and Roberto Gutiérrez as Gabriel Montoya Vidal in a picture from “See you in another life”. Diego Lopez Calvin
“There's a very descriptive first tone of the crime story, where the character doesn't know what's going to happen and we discover his universe. About halfway through the series, you already know that what you're transporting is explosives. The tone becomes more serious and moves towards drama and jihadist terrorism,” continues Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo, who describes his series as a “permanent tension between the banality of life in the neighborhood and the seriousness of the consequences, a game of scales small and huge .” This is also reflected in the length of the episodes, which are around 45 minutes when the story is lighter, shortening to around 30 minutes when the tragedy gains weight.
It was important to them to achieve great naturalism in both the production and the dialogue. “In everything, the treatment of art, the costumes… there is work to create a moral distance at all levels. That was the work of most discussions and meditations,” says Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo. The brothers cite the French films “Les Miserables” and “A Prophet” as well as the series “Gomorrah” as visual references for “See You in Another Life”. Responsible for the naturalness of the dialogues were Pablo Remón, Daniel Remón and Roberto Martín Maiztegui, who worked on the scale designed by the creators, together with Guillermo Chapa, who was responsible for collecting the documentation so that everything corresponded to reality. Because another challenge was to fictionalize this story. “One thing you have to ask yourself is: could it be like that? And yes, it could have been that way,” says Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo. “The summary tells a lot of things that allow us to move from one point to another, there is even a lot of dialogue. “This allowed us to create a foundation for the action and a tone for the characters,” adds his brother Alberto.
Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo, Roberto Gutiérrez and Alberto Sánchez-Cabezudo, at one point during the filming of the series. Diego Lopez Calvin
Another key was the cast, which consisted of not very recognizable faces. The basic element on which the rest was built was the protagonist. Roberto Gutiérrez, who plays the 15- and 16-year-old baby, was found outside a McDonald's. “We had seen 150 to 200 children, but Roberto showed up with mohawk hair and enormous nerves. He had a very powerful look,” says Alberto Sánchez-Cabezudo. He worked with a teacher for two months, essentially learning the trade. The rest of the cast was built around him. “The idea was to find a balance between an amateur actor and professional actors,” says Alberto Sánchez-Cabezudo.
Among them, Pol López stands out as Emilio Sánchez Trashorras, the former miner with mental problems sentenced to 34,175 years in prison, a character so excessive that he seems fictional. However, his attitudes and some of his formulations are taken from the process summary. They all had a trainer who took care of their Asturian accents. “The script was very natural, very suitable for everyday use and very precisely written. It had to sound like improvisation without actually being improvisation,” adds Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo. “It's a series that doesn't seem to be said, but rather spoken in the realm of everyday life, on the street, that was another big holdover,” he adds.
Pol López, in an image of the recreation of the 11M macro experiment in “See you in another life.” Guillermo Gumiel
Jabois stayed in touch with Gabriel Montoya Vidal. “He changes his phone often, he was in Melilla for a while and now he is in the north of Spain. “I spoke to him a few weeks ago to see how things were going and to tell him that the series doesn't glorify anything,” says the journalist. Although several television networks are after Baby, he continues to live as an anonymous person. The Sánchez-Cabezudos believe that 20 years later, it is time to talk about such a painful moment. “I think the victims are grateful to recover this as a historical memory,” says Alberto Sánchez-Cabezudo. “It is necessary to have a story. That is what the victims demand, to have a story,” concludes his brother Jorge.
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