Julio Medem

Julio Medem Lafont was born in San Sebastián on October 21, 1958, and although he spent many years in this city, his family soon moved to Madrid, where he studied at Nuestra Señora del Pilar, a highly prestigious Marianist school that has had students such as Alberto Cortina or José María Aznar. Soon, Medem discovered his love for cinema, thanks to his father’s Super 8 camera, with which he filmed major family events, and which Julio used to secretly take to film images of his sister Ana. The boy was a great athlete, considered a promise of athletics, who was about to get a scholarship to the Olympics.

Graduated in Medicine and Surgery from the University of the Basque Country, instead of practicing he decided to return to his hometown, where he entered the world of cinema, first as a critic for the newspaper “La voz de Euskadi”. With completely self-taught film training, he shot various shorts: El ciego , El jueves pasando , Fideos , Martín , etc.

Finally, he writes the script for a feature film, Vacas , and determined to find financing by any means, he travels to Madrid where he visits all the possible production companies, but they reject it with the excuse that it is an unclassifiable film, with a strange plot, and above all very unconventional. He was about to give up the illusion of taking Vacas to the movies, when he received a call from Sogetel, a company that had just been formed, which had decided to give the project the green light. Starring Carmelo Gómez and Emma Suárez , it narrates the experiences of two generations from the Second Carlist War to the Civil War, from the point of view of the cows.

The film –possibly his best work to date– was pleasantly surprising and received very good reviews, especially for the narrative singularity of the debuting director. Again with the two aforementioned actors, and with Nancho Novo , another recurring actor in his filmography, Medem shoots The Red Squirrel , about a guy about to commit suicide who helps a crashed motorist who has lost her memory. The film didn’t get the critical acclaim of its predecessor, but it did excite DreamWorks executives, and apparently none other than Steven Spielberg called Medem to propose that he film The Mask of Zorro for them , with Antonio Banderas ., since they were enthusiastic about the idea of ​​a Spanish director. But Medem does not see himself in a film so far removed from his style, and he ends up giving up, and focusing on Tierra , which in principle was also going to star Banderas. Unfortunately, he does not stop working in Hollywood, and pre-production lengthens, until Medem replaces him with Carmelo Gómez, once again paired with Emma Suárez. Ángel, a pest exterminator, suffers a split personality, and is torn between the love of two women.

Next, Medem managed to reach the general Spanish public, with Los amantes del círculo polar , in which he gives free rein to his particular stylistic resources, with which he manages to hide the lack of substance of the plot. Although it is becoming fashionable, Medem is already showing his biggest problem at this moment, he is still a director to follow, he is getting better and better at a technical level, but he seems exhausted as a screenwriter. This dangerous trend is unfortunately confirmed with Lucía y el sexo , erratic, gratuitous, morbid, and above all empty, despite the good work of Paz Vega , who established herself as an actress. Nominated for eleven Goyas, she finally won two: musician and revelation actress, Paz Vega.

Julio Medem’s most controversial film was La pelota vasca , a well-intentioned documentary on terrorism and violence in the Basque Country, in which the director wanted to offer a polyhedral vision of the matter, through interviews with more than 70 characters. Medem achieves technically impeccable and fresh work, but he cannot get along with the Popular Party politicians, who do not appear on the tape, his sympathies for the nationalists are evident, and he provokes indignation when in a parallel montage he alternates images of a widow from an ertzaintza, assassinated by ETA, with those of the wife of an ETA member who travels to see her husband in prison. Medem decided to abandon a complementary fiction film that was going to be titled Aitor. The skin against the stone , and leave the Basque theme.

The tragic death of his sister Ana in a car accident inspired him for the film Caótica Ana , a tribute to her memory starring a young painter with a somewhat hippy style ( Manuela Vellés ). But it is an anarchic film that has just reaffirmed the absolute decadence of the filmmaker, who insists on images of explicit sex, and who goes so far as to make a delusional plea against the Iraq War, in a shameful sequence –which on top of all pretends to be poetic. – in which the protagonist defecates on top of a senior American official who sends troops to the conflict. This time, the play ‘does not strain’. It receives dire reviews, and audiences don’t go to theaters.

Medem is completely taken aback. Until now they have laughed at him, and he does not quite understand why his film, very much in line with his immediate predecessors, is not convincing. “I have to assume that my film does not like it, I am used to it and it does not worry me. But I do take aggression badly and this aggression has been very strong. There have been people who have gone crazy against me, they have said very harsh things. Certain judges (critics), who are not many but not few either, have entered very strongly with the intention of crushing me ”. Medem does not hide his disappointment at the fact that he did not receive a single nomination at the Goyas. “It hurt me, I didn’t expect anything for myself with everything that had already fallen on me, but I did trust a nomination for Manuela Vellés, or photography, or music or art direction.”

Unfortunately, Medem (what a good director he would be if he had a good script), hasn’t quite found his way. He blames the failure of Caótica Ana on the fact that the Spanish public does not understand him, and he decides to take a radical turn in his career –or what he understands as such– with Room in Rome , shot in English –although the protagonists also have some phrase in Spanish or Russian, and there is some Italian. But this lesbian version of the Chilean En la cama , about a Russian and a Spanish woman who spend a night of sexual passion after meeting briefly in Rome, remains the same: a lot of meat and little intellectual chicha. It is assumed that Medem was willing to accept criticism – which is as bad as that of Caótica Ana– but I expected a great commercial success due to the torrid nature of the proposal and its explicit trailer. But the film is an absolute disaster. Despite the fact that the press and television pay enormous attention to it, the blow was resounding. In its first weekend in Spain, it surpasses in revenue even Magical Trip to Africa , a Spanish production in 3D of very little interest. The box office data is humiliating: it was released with a not inconsiderable number of 130 copies, but the average collection for each one of them was 1,609 euros.

Medem has yet to shoot a film entitled Pericles and Aspasia , in which Pericles tells Euripides while they are going on a ship to the Peloponnesian War, his love story with Aspasia, a young woman who accumulates the beauty of Aphrodite and the wisdom of Athena. For this story based on true events, Medem spent a year researching Greece in the fifth century BC. But the film was supposed to be a huge blockbuster financed with the profits it was supposed to make with Room in Rome , so for the moment it has been completely shelved.