MARSHLAND has won 38 awards to date – including 10 Goya awards (the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars) – so director Alberto Rodriguez is more than happy with the reception so far.
The film is set in 1980, when detectives Juan (Javier Gutiérrez) and Pedro (Raúl Arévalo) travel to southern Spain to investigate the brutal murder of two sisters.
Their investigation leads them to drug trafficking and a race against the clock to stop the serial killer from striking again. The film is released in Irish and British cinemas today and while many comparisons have been made to the hit HBO series True Detective, Rodriguez says he wasn’t influenced by the show.
“My inspiration came from films such as Mystery of Murders, Chinatown and Bad Day at Black Rock,” he says. “I’m sure that I have been unconsciously influenced by many other movies and directors, but I had never heard of True Detective.
“While I was editing the movie, Raul Arevalo [who plays Pedro] sent me a message with the trailer for the series and said: `Alberto, someone has copied your idea and decided to make a TV series!’
“So earlier this year I had some time and watched True Detective and really enjoyed it.”
Rodriguez says he is a fan of directors John Huston, John Ford, Billy Wilder, the Coen brothers, David Fincher and Bong Joon-ho. He explains the origin of Marshland (La Isla Minima).
“I was at an exhibition by Seville photographer Atín Aya, who had devoted himself to capturing the last vestiges of a style of life that existed in the marshlands of the Guadalquivir river [in southern Spain] 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.
“So that was my first contact with La Isla, the sunset for a landscape fit for a western of the end of the century. And then, in 2009, writer Rafael Cobos and I toyed with the possibility of writing a `noir’ story, inspired by films such as Chinatown and Bad Day at Black Rock.”
The film is centred in a small Andalusian village that seems frozen in time. A killer is on the loose and several adolescents disappear without trace. But it’s only when two young sisters go missing that the two homicide detectives are dispatched from Madrid to the deep south to try to catch the killer.
“Pedro and Juan are then caught in a web of intrigue fed by the apathy and introverted nature of the locals,” says the director. “Nothing is what it seems and the investigation encounters unexpected difficulties. Both men realise they must put aside their professional differences if they are to stop the person responsible for the disappearance of the sisters before more young girls go missing.
“Pedro is idealistic and opinionated. He rebels against authority, against injustice, he is terribly fair. He is an ideologue.
“Juan worked in the Social and Political Brigade and is an expert in torture. Trained as a spy, he knows and applies the methods and work habits he acquired many years ago. He is cunning and secretive. He represents the darkness of Spain’s past.”
He says there was a definite reason for setting the film in 1980.
“That was a year of great political tension in Spain, a tension which is perceived in the background. The marshlands are tough, magnetic and cruel and this is heightened by the underlying political conflict at the time.”
:: Marshland is in cinemas now. See review P38
