Alba Flores, Nairobi in Money Heist, and Spanish Academy Award nominees Joya La Dani and Julio Ho Chin are set to star in Candy Lázaro’s The Shepherdess, a film likely to feature at this year’s Match Me! co-production forum in Locarno.
Flores also played Sarai Vargas in the international hit film “Locked Up” set in women's prisons.
Non-binary singer and actor La Dani received a 2024 Goya Award nomination for his critically acclaimed film Love and Revolution; Spain’s Hu Chen was nominated for the same Goya for China, in which his performance and role challenged stereotypes of Chinese immigrants in Spain. He was one of the first Spanish actors of Chinese descent to receive an Oscar nomination.
This basic idea of inclusiveness runs through the “shepherdess”.
A feature film that revisits the character of the androgynous maquis Florenc Pla and establishes a dialogue between him and Candy Lázaro, the film's director, who in the film undergoes his medical and administrative transformation.
“The Shepherdess” has been selected for the 2024 edition of the Ecosmera Periac program in San Sebastián, one of the most prestigious development programs in Spain, and it is also the first time in Spain that the production and directing team – producer Charly Bogosa Cortés at the Spanish company Mansalva Films and director Lázaro – consists of two transgender non-binary people who come together to tell a story that starts with a real historical figure, Bogosa pointed out.
Pla was a victim of his time. Born a hermaphrodite in 1917, Pla was baptized a girl and sent to the hills of eastern Spain to tend sheep. After the husband of his landlord was arrested, tortured and executed, and Pla was stripped naked by a Guardia Civil to ridicule his genitals, Pla joined the Maquis, who fought against Franco’s security forces during the first 15 years of the Spanish Civil War that followed.
He transformed into a man—the identity he always wanted—and fought for 18 months, branded by Franco's propaganda system as a monster, a fearsome woman, La Pastora, who ate children, according to popular legend.
But “The Shepherdess” is not a traditional autobiography. In it, the life stories of Bla and director Lazzaro intertwine, “allowing Florentino to move through time and space as he pleases; between the mountain and the city, between the past and the present, living at the same time his years with the rebels” and Lazzaro’s transformation, as the film’s synopsis says.
Lazaro will also play Pla. The two characters' exchanges will almost inevitably turn in part to their experiences with identity. However, Bogosa is careful to stress that the film is “not a heavy drama. There is a playful element to it.”
This vision also aims to de-dramatize gender relations. The producer added: “We all live in this world. We share spaces. We are exposed to violence but we are also exposed to love. Everything is simpler than it seems. And that is important, as the film says.”
Lazaro and Bogosa do not want to make a black and white film.
Pla was arrested and imprisoned from 1960 to 1977 for 29 murders committed by the rebels before he joined them, and was released in 1977 as part of a general amnesty and adopted by the family of a prison guard. He is now rehabilitated as a hero of the Spanish resistance, and a street in his village is named after him.
“We don’t want to say that the present is better than the past, nor that the cities are better than the villages. In both places and at both times there were and are good times. When Florentino joined the Maki as a man, people almost said ‘OK’. Now we have to explain everything 4,000 times.”
The key to Bla's life lies in the understandability and humaneness of his life decisions, which he explains with such naturalness in the few interviews he has given.
“We are taking Florentine’s story in our own way, without much drama. We don’t want homosexuals to be a limited category. At Mansalva Films, we aim to achieve distribution opportunities for a general audience,” explained Bogosa.
