Argentine Director Explores Cinema’s Role in Reviving Communities and Addressing Isolation
There are problems in rural Spain that cinema can highlight, but at the same time, they need to be solved here. His documentary work and commitment to fiction prove that art can and must assist in guiding the discourse of painful socio-political realities.
What Is the Function Of Fiction In Creating Change
Argentinian filmmaker Diego Sabanés sees cinema as one way to address issues such as the loss of people from villages throughout northern Spain. Sabanés, who recently showed his new documentary on the groundbreaking Zero magazine at the ‘Ciudad de Soria’ International Short Film Festival, believes that cinema can be more than a narrative vehicle; it can be a call to action. So said Sabanés in an interview ahead of the festival with EFE, adding that fiction seeks to open “those doors to imagine alternatives” and therefore “can help not only to make visible but also to solve, even hypothetically.”
He argued that younger generations are increasingly gravitating toward streaming networks instead of movie theaters for fiction, reminding him that these outlets can also create a public square. Fiction can prompt people to think about complex social problems that tend to be eclipsed by the more immediate issues of the day.
An educator of film in Argentina, Cuba, and Spain, Sabanés argues that people — including the public health officials she typically works with — can connect the personal struggles revealed by their filmic stories to more extensive social conditions that are often reflected in fiction. By tackling sensitive topics usually faced through indirect or distant experience, if not proximity, film can, like photography, create an intimate association of audiences with a given issue, producing empathy and awareness for social work.
Community Building Through Participation
Sabanás notes that even outside of his filmmaking activity, he values participation highly, deeming it essential for fostering engagement and cohesion in society. Culture does not simply exist in museums and concert halls, says Sabanés; it flourishes at the intersections between people and the sharing of their tales. One aspect of his writing consistent with his ideas about film festivals being important spaces for community development is his stress on participatory culture.
According to him, film festivals provide enormous entertainment value. “They’re opportunities for intergenerational conversations and people coming together to discuss various topics.” Sabanés relates to film as an art and a means of encouraging community life, particularly in rural or depopulated areas of Spain were getting together is becoming ever scarcer.
Sabanés, who has lived in Spain for years, understands the terrible problems of rural communities where populations have shrunk in recent decades, and social fabric has sometimes broken down. He arrived on an Ibermedia scholarship and has since made several shorts and the feature Mentiras Piadosas, adapted from the stories of Argentine author Julio Cortázar. He has also worked on successful Spanish series like Gran Hotel and Cuéntame cómo pasó. These experiences informed him on how storytelling can unite people.
Increasing our Frames of Reference by Cultural Stories
Sabanés also showed a documentary on Zero magazine at the Soria Film Festival, pioneering in its day for the Spanish LGBTQ+ community and the country. The documentary, called Zero, la revista que sacó del armario a un país, was written by Sabanés and directed by Damián Ainstein. The two-part documentary looks at the development of the magazine, which started as a niche publication and came to be seen as a cultural phenomenon that advanced gay rights in Spain, with the testimony of such vital figures as television host Jesús Vázquez, politician Miquel Iceta, choreographer Nacho Duato and singer Alaska.
Zero magazine was instrumental in the national promotion of gay and lesbian issues into the public arena — and giving people across the country a voice and a sense of community. According to Sabanés, the film demonstrates the power of journalism to promote social change and how a single publication (in this case, La Última Edición) can affect this kind of transformation. In charting the magazine’s influence on public perception and personal experience, the documentary illustrates the role of media in enabling civil rights movements and engendering meaningful social change.
However, Sabanés adds that it is necessary to recognize regional differences. Living in a small town where people are more connected versus life in a bustling metropolis can be decidedly different for LGBTQ+ people. As Sabanés puts it, “The reality of living in a place where everybody knows everybody like Soria is very different than a big city with so much anonymity.” While Zero’s story explores identity, acceptance, and belonging in an unmistakably contemporary urban context, Sabanés intends for the story to take nuanced dialogues on the subjects beyond the confines of where diversity is often confined to dialogue, history, and – too frequently even the identified events of agency and change – by ingraining them in the infamous and often demonized rural settings, where, she hopes to contextualize the culturally relevant but accurate universal experience of a search for acceptance and belonging through identity.
Connecting in the Age of Digital Movies
Sabanés remembers the reversal of cinema as a public meeting point in the digital age. Audiences have changed since the rise of streaming platforms, usually prioritizing the convenience of at-home watching over the collective experience of a cinema. He mourns that “the cinema theater is relegating itself to places of entertainment, but no longer meeting centers as a society,” acknowledging the extent to which late-night streaming has replaced the community experience of watching together.
But for Sabanés, this transition opens doors to storytelling. Fiction (as both movies and digital series) may still “shed light on sensitive issues,” the organization said, especially when audiences may otherwise be “a little deaf to what others are going through.” Fiction films that depict stories we can all relate to can bring awareness to matters that must be addressed, even when audiences may struggle with their own issues. Sabanés believes that understanding happens through fiction and cinema, which is an essential element in creating empathy across varied social terrains.
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Sabanés is the auteur and often the social conscience of the series, and both contemplate the filmmaker as a storyteller — and social activist — in an exemplary fashion. Cinema isn’t so many things anymore, but his faith that fiction can spark dialogue that can bridge cultures reminds us that cinema—despite how digital obliterates and changes our interaction with it—can still be a vehicle for community and change. Whether in the form of historical documentaries like Zero or narrative films, Sabanés argues for a cinema that builds community, welcomes non-locals, and offers the sort of alternative thought that contemporary pressing social matters demand.
