A travel through "las tres mil"
Starting with a documentary material especially rich and complex, - Las Tres Mil, with its mix of high-profile artists, its revisited flamenco with the influences of modern music, and the social problems of a drug-ridden gypsy community -, Dominique Abel and Juanjo Ibañez have conceived a directed documentary, the progression of which is organized around the celebration of an open air concert for everyone living in and around the neighborhood.
This concert will be a homage, as agreed by the artists and the rest of the community, to a big artist and figure, namely Pepe el Quemao. A poet, storyteller, author of lyrics that everybody sings in recordings and tours.
The preparations for the concert, the difficulties involved in the organization of such an event in a place like Las Tres Mil - such as managing to find some of the artists that live in the center of the estate, a place where nobody wants to go due to extortion and murder -, and finally the concert itself and the final party, will be opportunities to get acquaintance of these people, gifted with talent and inhabitants of the poorest neighborhood in Seville, where they all share their joys and pities.
The development, based on two visits to the estate to get to know the protagonists, has been carried out as a script.
Obviously, the film is a documentary and in no way, the protagonists are asked to recite a text or lead out a role. However, using a script seemed more useful to authors for two reasons:
- It allows to show the dramatic progression of what we try to achieve, the concert and its preparation.
- It has allowed Dominique and Juanjo to restore the flavour of the situations lived during the making of the documentary, the preliminary visits, the exchanges between the main protagonists. Everything in the script is true, has happened and has been seen or heard. The authors have just adapted the events to new situations.
Productor notes
In one of the lots of the periphery of Seville, burned by the Sun, where there are accumulated many of official houses (limited revenue), there spreads the SOUTHSIDE that concentrates more than forty thousand inhabitants, with majority of gipsy from different neighborhoods (especially of Triana) that had to change because of the real-estate speculation; what ended in an uprooting that has led them to the marginalization and in some cases to the drug and the delinquency. The police, taxi drivers, sweepers or firemen, you upset they enter some zones of the neighborhood as the calls " The Bronx " or "Las Vegas".
In spite of cornering the first pages of the mass media as one of the most dangerous neighborhoods of the country, is, since arranges an appointment in this film, the neighborhood with more artist for square meter of Seville. There is where one finds the bigger concentration of new flamenco artist, known or anonymous.
Of this neighborhood they have gone out musician as important as "Pata Negra" (Raimundo and Rafael Amador), Juana and Martin del Revuelo and The Farruco, between others. But this movie us brings over to other artists that, in spite of possessing equal talent, are out of " show bussines " and that, instead of repressive measurements, need promotion and social and labour support.
This movie shows us such and since they live, the neighborhood sings and dances hisdaily life, and in spite of the devastations caused by the heroine the young men do not leave the music of the old men. The traditional Flamenco achieves an original crossbreeding with funky, the reggae, the rap or the blues and all the musical current inventions.
"SEVILLE SOUTHSIDE", it is the result of complex, laborious and long project. With a difficult funding, the final budget, after be exceeding in several occasions, has been of almost a million Euros. The filming provoked numerous problems, not only to logistic level. Shooted in five weeks during November, 2001, entirely in natural locations of the neighborhood. The postproduction has occupied more than one year and a half, giving as result a document that will stay in the annals of the musical and sociological history of Andalusia.
"SEVILLE SOUTHSIDE" is not strictly a documentary. The people interpreting himselfto. And this it is the first time that one organizes and a concert appears in Tres Mil Viviendas, which has raised great expectation, not only for the artistic interest, but also for the bad social widespread conscience that does not find viable solutions to this neighborhood.
After many days coexist with them, we hope that these good peoples are known better and to help to make aware the spectators in the search of exit for the distressing reality of this Sevillian group.
