Beneath Your Skin

Beneath Your Skin began as a work of fiction inspired by magical realism and the theatrical tradition of plays such as No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre, Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, Death Squad by Alfonso Sastre, and The Foundation by Antonio Buero Vallejo. Like these works, it unfolds in a single confined space with a small cast of characters, where time itself, the feeling of unreality, and the characters' gradual awakening to the truth become the central forces driving the story. As the screenplay evolved, we felt compelled to discover the real people who might have inhabited that room: four victims of Francoist repression. Four among more than 114,000 people who remain disappeared, still lying beneath the earth, waiting to be found. That search led us to follow and document a real exhumation carried out by the Forensic Archaeology Laboratory at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM). During this process, we witnessed the discovery and reburial of three victims executed in Chinchilla de Montearagón (Albacete) in August 1939. The journey resulted in more than fifty hours of documentary footage. It became a story of waiting, searching, and shared emotions with the families—those who inherited the pain of silence and who finally succeeded in recovering the remains of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, allowing them to rest where they always belonged: with their loved ones. The documentary process transformed the original screenplay. Fiction was rewritten to give voice and presence to people who were not symbolic figures, but real individuals who once lived among us: José Sahuquillo Varela, José Tendero Martínez, Dídimo Martínez Ponce, and Antonio Beleña Garrido. In returning to the project's origins, we decided to stage the fictional narrative as a live theatrical performance, inviting audiences to witness it from only a few metres away before filming it for the final feature. The result is a film in which the living and the dead, those searching and those being searched for, the murdered and their descendants, engage in a poetic and metaphorical dialogue. The visual and formal distance between the documentary and fictional worlds encouraged us to explore new cinematic languages. Animation became the bridge between them, adding an additional narrative layer while enriching the film's poetic and visual identity. Ultimately, Beneath Your Skin seeks to restore a voice and a body to four ordinary men who suffered under Franco's dictatorship. They are not famous figures like Federico García Lorca, but local citizens from Madrigueras (Albacete) who believed in a better future and paid for those ideals with their lives. Beyond telling their story, the film also draws attention to the institutional neglect surrounding Spain's historical memory and the thousands of exhumations that remain unfinished, waiting for justice, dignity, and remembrance.