It's the first day of filming on a half-hour short film about a Spanish fisherman in his sixties who causes a revolution in his village when he abandons his wife for an English printmaker who has gone there to live. This is the first foray into fiction by the young Spanish documentay filmmaker, Juan Carlos Romera. The cast is artfully made up of a mix of professional actors, an amateur theater group and citizens of Las Negras, one of the last remaining traditional fishing villages on Spain's Mediterranean coast as yet unspoiled by tourism. The professional actors are Idilio Cardoso, who plays José, the fisherman, and Maria Alfonsa Rosso, the beleagured wife. The role of Maureen, the English artist is played by real-life expatriate British printmaker, Maureen Booth.

The title of the film, "¡Bive!" is a semi-literate Spanish fisherman's written rendition of "¡Vive!", "Live!" "It's the story of an old man who doesn't want to die without experiencing real love," says producer/director, Romera, who also wrote the original screenplay. The film, narrated from the points of view of the Spanish fisherman and the English printmaker, reflects the clash between the rigidly traditional way of life of the former and the free creative lifestyle of the latter. It portrays the effects this confrontation has on the placid life of a Mediterranean fishing village. Romera tells his story in deceptively simple terms, with an eloquent economy of dialogue and a universality reminiscent of the plays of Spanish poet and playwrite, Federico García Lorca, one of which, "Blood Wedding," was based on an incident which took place in the twenties in a farmhouse which still stands just a few kilometers inland from where "¡Bive!" is being filmed.

This Las Negras grandmother never
expected to be in the movies.

The Young Director's Secret
Though "¡Bive!" is Romera's first fiction film, and his budget is logically limited, he has chosen to work with a proven professional technical crew, headed by veteran director of photography, Madrid-based Juan Antonio de la Cueva. The results of the first couple of days' shooting confirm the wisdom of his decision: "It looks even better than I expected," says Romera, adding, "Maureen is surprising all of us by the way she has melted into the cast and made the character her own. She's a remarkable fast starter!"

I know what you're wondering: "Why is the character called 'Maureen' and how does an English printmaker who has never set foot on a movie set nor theater stage before, get called upon to play a leading role in a film?"

"It's like most of the nicest things that have happened to me in my lifetime," says Maureen, "pure serendipity. We met Juan Carlos six or eight years ago when my husband did some work voice dubbing documentaries into English for him," she adds. "Then we met his girlfriend (now wife), María José, and since then we've been friends, eating together at one another's houses at least once a month. So we've followed Juan Carlos' evolution as a filmmaker from the beginning. We felt like proud parents when his Tibetan documentary, 'Tashi Delek,' which told the story of a Spanish woman who works with orphans and street children in that country, was selected for the Hollywood Documentary Film Festival."

Fascinated with Etching
"Juan Carlos was fascinated from the outset with my etching studio-the press, the plates, the smell of ink and turps-and when it came time for him to write his first fiction script he made the female lead an English lady printmaker named, funnily enough, 'Maureen.' I was both terrified and delighted when he asked me to play this role in his film, but in the end I decided to go ahead. Maureen is, after all, in large part, me."

Sharing personal histories...

"Every Single Cell in my Body..."
Maureen Booth discovered Spain almost 40 years ago as a young housewife from Manchester, U.K. on holiday with her husband and two small children. Since then it has rained some, as the Spanish say. Maureen moved with her family to an incipient tourist village on the Mediterranean coast of Málaga, where they built and managed a small hotel for a few years. Those were years of intense learning and changes. By the end of that period, in 1969, she emerged from her demure Manchester housewife's chrysalis and flexed her wings. She changed husbands, changed villages (for a pueblo in the foothills of Granada's Sierra Nevada) and changed professions. "Since those days I think I've changed every single cell in my body," says Maureen, grandmother of five, who took Spanish nationality in the mid-eighties. "I was determined be a painter, so as soon as I got to Granada I set about it."

Since then Maureen has forged a formidable career as painter and printmaker, progressing successively through three studios, the last one incorporating an etching press and space for editioning prints. "I was lucky enough to be chosen at the end of the seventies to participate in the etching project of the Rodríguez Acosta Foundation in Granada," says Maureen. "That was an every-day-for-two-years experience in a fully equipped printmaking workshop with three etching presses, a giant resin box, a 'maestro grabador,' two printing technicians and all materials provided by the Foundation, all in the company of an international group of artists. It was a dream come true. It was there that I discovered I was also a printmaker." She adds, "Spain is a great country for artists, as Spanish people have a special sensitivity for art and poetry and all things cultural, as well as a seemingly unlimited tolerance for artists."

Shooting begins in Maureen's printmaking studio.

"I Looked at Their Faces and Decided to Change My Life"
Juan Carlos Romera is the prototype of the brilliant kid who appears out of nowhere. That is to say, he doesn't descend from an illustrious Spanish film family like the Rabal's or the Bardem's. Nor did he study filmmaking in Madrid, Spain's cinema Mecca. His initiation in cinema isn't being financed by his mother, as was the case of Luis Buñuel's first film, for example. Romera, born in Switzerland of Spanish immigrant parents, grew up in Vallecas, Madrid's quintessencial proletarian neighborhood, where like so many young people in the eighties, he studied 'informatica' and went to work in a bank. "I lasted just over a year," says Romera. "One day I began to notice the faces of my older colleagues, those who had been in the bank for 10 or 15 years. That was when I took the decision to change my life. I signed up for a training course for TV cameramen and never looked back."

When he started to feel the itch to make his first fiction film, Romera was acutely aware that he had no idea of screen writing. "But I firmly believe that in six months you can learn anything, so I signed up for a script writing course with the Cuban screen writer, Eliseo Altunaga. Romera took with him to Cuba the germ of a script idea. It was about a mature English lady artist in Spain who disrupts life in a traditional fishing village by getting involved with a local fisherman.

Juan Carlos' production assistant is his sister, Raquel.

The Late-Blooming Fishing Village
Romera discovered the village of Las Negras thanks to his wife, who is a native of Almería province. A few years ago his brother-in-law put him onto an opportunity to buy a little apartment a stone's throw from the beach, so Juan Carlos and María José started spending summers and weekends there. It wasn't long before they were considered neighbors by the locals, and it was only natural that Juan Carlos should have chosen to locate his first fiction film there.

Las Negras remains today a humble village of flat-roofed houses with its feet in the Mediterranean and its back to the Almería badlands, lands so parched and poor that the cactus dries up and dies. It was near here in the sixties that Sergio Leone, Samuel Bronstein, David Lean and other filmmakers chose to shoot films like "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," "El Cid," "Patton," and "Lawrence of Arabia."

These badlands were so bad that, being useless for anything else, the Spanish government declared them a national park: el Parque Nacional de Nijar-Cabo de Gata, which includes both the land and the sea bed, one of the most unspoiled in the Mediterranean. Though the last 30 years saw the entire Mediterranean coastline "developed" nearly to death, Las Negras was so far off the beaten track and so ill communicated that it never took off touristically, remaining a talisman for a few devoted primitivist holiday makers.

A forward thinking German entrepreneur actually built a small aparthotel here in the sixties, but finally had to sell off the units at a loss to families from the provincial capital to use as weekend residences. There used to be a Civil Guard barracks in Las Negras but even Franco's once-feared-and-loathed military police got bored here and left. Their little flat-roofed barracks with its terrace imperfectly shaded by five scraggly eucalyptus trees now houses Diego's bar and restaurant, where the cast and crew eat all their meals and where some of the scenes of the film are being shot.

"José" enters into the world of the artist.

All is Blackness
If you look up and down the coastline at night here, all is blackness. And if you look at NASA's satellite photo of Europe by night you'll notice a short gap as dark as the middle of the Sahara between the cities of Almería and Cartagena. That's where Las Negras lies. The village reflects both faces of primitivism: the simplicity is very charming, but the service which cleans up the plastic bags which litter the beach is at best imperfect. In compensation they have a delightful beach bar built in the old style, of wood. It must be illegal. Many years ago the luminaries of the regional government bulldozed all the wonderful traditional (and traditionally insalubrious) "chiringuitos" made of cane and driftwood and obliged the owners to put up new sanitized concrete bunkers. Presumably they double as a first line of defense against amphibious landings.

Las Negras still doesn't even have proper cellphone coverage; most people make their calls from the phone booth above the beach. One is reminded of "Local Hero," that wonderful film in which Burt Lancaster plays a Texas oil magnate who wants to buy a one-phone-booth coastal village in Scotland to locate a gigantic oil refinery. In the end, instead of the capitalist swallowing the village, the village, with its charm, humanity, humor, sincerity and Scotch whiskey, swallows the capitalist. Las Negras is a little bit like that. Just substitute red wine for Scotch whiskey.

Is This an Earthly Paradise?
Does this Medierranean fishing village, so far back of beyond that even the cops and the phone companies have abandoned it, sound to you like an earthly paradise? It is, actually. Or rather, it was. Because the building cranes so familiar to the Spanish coastlines now loom over the top of Diego's bar even as I write this missal from his terrace, while I wait for his wife María to fire up the coffee machine. And when the morning's work begins on the hotel they are building at the back, one of the crane booms swings ominously over Diego's guests breakfasting on the terrace, like an ill omen from on high. In the next few years the wrong people are going to make an awful lot of money in Las Negras. A small bottle of orange juice in the bar next door to the hostal already costs approximately what you would pay for it, say, in the Piazza San Marcos in Venice.

Maureen's charcoal portrait of "José"

Alive and Well in Las Negras
Juan Carlos has housed the cast and crew in this new hostal, a modest-but-neat two-star hotel. The mustachioed owner greets us affably at the door with the standard "anything you need..." speech. His hands are small and white. That moustache reminds me of somebody, but I can't recall who it is. It's hot in Las Negras and air conditioning is essential in order to get a night's sleep. After two nights of grappling fruitlessly with the remote control of the room's air conditioner I finally surrender and ask for the owner's help.

As I explain the problem in detail he grimaces with extreme concern, as if the elephant were standing on his foot, not mine. He comes up to the room, picks up the remote control and starts pressing buttons judiciously. He concentrates, he cogitates, he empathizes, he suffers vicariously. (Juan Carlos could cast him as the village priest!) In the end the theatrical hotel owner gets the same thing I got: hot air. At one point he indicates the face of the control and asks, "What does it say here 'en inglés,' 'EEE-MED-LO.'" Then it hits me. That moustache. Just last week we saw a re-run of "The Return of the Pink Panther" on television. It's Inspector Clouseau! He's alive and well in Las Negras! My guess is that the air conditioner has been broken for months and Inspector Clouseau mounts this number for his unwitting guests about three times a week.

Juan Antonio de la Cueva, director
of photography, and his wife, Esperanza.

Seasoned Professionals, 14-Hour Days
It's a revelation seeing professional actors at work close up. It's not merely realistic; it goes way beyond that. Idilio (José the fisherman) is constantly dazzling his fellow cast members with his interpretation, and the first time Maureen saw María Alfonsa play the heart-rending scene of the spurned wife, she was nearly in tears. So wrenching is María Alfonsa's body language in that scene that it's more like Spanish dance than acting. "It actually made me feel guilty," says Maureen, "I nearly broke into tears."

The cast and crew are regularly working 12 and 14-hour days, and it's hot out there. What motivates these people, most of them seasoned professionals, to participate in a beginning director's short-film project? It's certainly not the money, as most of them are working for just expenses or token sums at best. "I love working with young directors," says María Alfonsa Rosso, "they're so fresh and unspoiled, so full of 'ilusión', of poetry and noble intentions. Also, since nobody's getting paid, the whole project is shot through with a spirit of altruism and comradeship. The rewards are great, especially if it's an interesting film you're working on, and this one is certainly that!"

Juan Antonio, the director of photography, agrees with María Alfonsa, but goes even further. "It's great working with young people who are enthusiastic and innovative," he says, "but there's another incentive for me. On a novice director's short film I have much more freedom to experiment and create. I'm not restricted the way I would be on a commercial production. That means a lot to me."

Juan Borrell, the sound tecnician, nods in agreement and adds, "As for me, I didn't go to school to learn this profession. Everything I know I've learned from my 'compañeros.' The least I can do is to return something to those who are coming along after me."

This willingness to lend a hand to the young filmmaker extends down to the last person related to the project. The retired ship's captain who has restored Las Negras' only remaining sailing fishing boat has volunteered it for the film. He has also volunteered to sail it for the crew, even though this entails enclosing himself in the boat's tiny hold in the blazing heat for hours at a time while filming goes on. And this at no cost.

If you must make a difficult
decision, make it in bed!

Shooting in the Artist's Home and Studio
The last three days of shooting take place in Maureen's home and studio in the Granada mountains. They are all interiors, so there will be no confusion with the arid landscape of Las Negras. Actually Juan Carlos uses a single house in Las Negras both for the exterior of Maureen's house and the interior of José's. It seems film directors need to have convoluted minds. Ironically the house belongs to an Englishman, who has taken care to preserve the traditional Andalusian style in his home. The locals, bored with local "typismo," which they associate with lean times, are increasingly into neo-Bauhaus and mod cons.

Having a film crew take over your house is like inviting 15-20 guests, each one with a couple of 1,000-6,000 watt movie lights, light stands and about a kilometer of wire each one. There comes a point, when they've been hammering, screwing, taping, mounting and dismounting for a couple of days, that you fear your life will never be the same again. It is hellish interesting, however, and in the end patience, good humor and team spirit overcome all the inconveniences. The catered meals together outside on the terrace are hearty and fun. By the time the end comes the warm feeling of achievement is washing over everybody. The professionals in the cast and crew agree that Maureen is a natural actress and she should expect phone calls from Madrid whenever casting people there need "una inglesa." The goodbyes are typically Spanish, lots of kissing on both cheeks.

Suddenly everybody is gone. As John Wayne used to say, "It's too quiet out there!"