Action! A group of people dressed in scarves and anoraks gather in front of the door of the Antonio Machado Institute (Alcalá de Henares, Madrid). It is June 2023 and 40 degrees in the shade, but the newspapers are from February 1996 and the former president of the Constitutional Court Francisco Tomás y Valiente was assassinated. A flap closes. They are filming one of the last episodes of Tell me how it happened, the legendary TVE series that covers the history of Spain from the sixties to the present in its more than 20 years of broadcasting. In this chapter they address ETA’s most turbulent moments.
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Cameras, fans, water bottles and white paint. In this commotion, the head of the chapter, Antonio Cano, stands out as he approaches two extras to thank them for their presence. They are Adrián González and Juncal Infante, they were witnesses the day Jon Bienzobas shot Tomás and Valiente in his office at the Faculty of Law of the Autonomous University of Madrid.
The professor’s death caused an outburst of boredom in Spanish society, which led to the terrorist organization beginning to direct its attacks on civilians – a year later leading to the assassination of Miguel Ángel Blanco. On that February 14, a young man in a student union at the faculty where the professor died invented a gesture that made history: he painted his hands white as a sign of protest. This student was González, he always wanted to stay in the shadows because the idea was his, but everyone’s project. Thanks to an EL PAÍS interview this year, the Cuéntame team managed to get in touch with him. “I have not liked the partisan use that has been given over the years to an idea that has brought us together on the right and the left, and that is why I think it is time to tell the whole truth.” , he explains to the newspaper during filming.
González must have been standing right outside the law office at the time of the murder. Infante had asked him to accompany her to recovery, but he ended up helping another friend with some traffic stops. “Maybe it saved my life because I would have been able to handle it because of my character,” he reflects. When she arrived at the university, she went to the floor where her friend was being examined, but found a pool of blood.
The production team of “Cuéntame” is filming its latest episode. DAVID EXPÓSITO
He didn’t witness the shot, but Infante still remembers the noise clearly. “I was reading the exam in front of the court and suddenly heard a file fall, but it repeated itself twice more,” the witness explains to the actors who will recreate this historic moment. Then another student came in and said that they had killed Tomás and Valiente. As Infante left the class, he saw the killer pointing at students in the hallway to make way for him to leave the building. She dodged the pool of blood they had formed when they took the professor from his office and made her way down to the association’s headquarters. It was in this place in Autonoma that González, full of nervousness, founded the White Hands civil movement against ETA and wrote the speech that was distributed throughout Spain.
González is angry that “they turned off ETA again.” “I know what it’s like to look under the car. “They fill their mouths with the victims in order to take advantage of them in a partisan way, and that shows a lack of sensitivity.” For this reason, they opted for silence in this demonstration, which was attended by more than 10,000 people and which, in their replica, was for the series was respected. With the two witnesses in close-up, the fiction has carried the meetings they held before the rally, the way they decided to paint their hands, and the atmosphere of boredom into 2023.
For González, the chapter will have little meaning: “Some will learn of an episode they did not know about and others will relive sensations, but if in that moment millions of people were mobilized and now we are divided again, I believe not.” These sequences will arouse the conscience.” Juncal is more optimistic and trusts in the change of young people. Carmen Climent, who plays María, the youngest daughter of the Alcántara family, thinks the same: “I’m from Bilbao and my family always tried to protect me when I was little. I remember it like a story, but through filming I understood it.” the seriousness and the “young people’s eyes are opened a little.”
The actress assures that having her on set is a luxury. “I don’t know what a gunshot sounds like or how to act, now I know firsthand,” he says. The team tried to recreate the situations so realistically that Infante and González couldn’t help but get excited. One of the actors plays González as a young man and explains how they will paint their hands. What impressed him most were the dialogues. When he suggested holding the silent demonstration, he said: “Let’s be 30 or 40, we will be there.” “Every time I hear it, tears come to my eyes because we never thought about the scale it would have,” explains González. And the same sentence is said by Climent.
But it wasn’t just the nostalgia of the two witnesses that was experienced on the filming set. The atmosphere that is breathed in is one of farewell. Many of those present will no longer be recording that day and said goodbye with applause at the end of their last lecture. Director Antonio Cano was there from the beginning, when Carlitos Alcántara couldn’t get an inch off the ground. Of the 400 episodes that make up the series, he directed 100. “There’s a whole life behind it. “I have my natural family and the Cuéntame family, with whom I spend almost more time than with the first,” says the man who has regretfully devoted a third of his life to this fiction.
Whether it works or not, Tell Me How It Happened has reviewed the latest episodes of the story. Although this latest installment only contains seven chapters, spanning from 1994 to 2001 – the year the fiction was published – it has a fitting ending, according to Cano, after filming stopped last year. His unforgettable header was the first thing you saw and will be the last. At the end of the cycle, the Alcántaras sat down on their sofa in San Genaro in 2001 to watch the beginning of a series about a Spanish family whose melody is known practically throughout the country.
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