Xavier García
Vigo, December 13 (EFE). – The filmmaker Daniel Sánchez Arévalo got “goosebumps” when he saw the characteristic rondallas of the south of the province of Pontevedra and decided to make a film, this time for theaters and not stages, about the “sense of community” they gave him.
In an interview with EFE in Vigo – the city he chose for the first presentation of his new film “Rondallas” – the director explains that 13 years after “The Great Spanish Family” he wanted to return to the big screen with this choral tragicomedy with which he wants to “bring people back to the cinemas”.
It all started when his producer and friend Ramón Campos showed him a video of the Rondalla of Santa Eulalia de Mos, a community near Vigo, with their traditional costumes, bagpipes, tambourines, charrascas and drums covering the song “Thunderstruck” by the legendary British hard rock group AC/DC.
He was intrigued and wanted to go to Mos to meet them and watch them rehearse. In this small Galician town, more than a hundred people of all ages, from small children to the very old – none of them were music professionals – gathered to make music “for the love of art, culture, tradition” and “the feeling of being part of something”.
“That really captivated me and I said to myself: I want to make a film that conveys what they conveyed to me every time I went to a rehearsal with them,” he explains.
He also emphasizes that “in an increasingly polarized time in which the individual is increasingly gaining the upper hand,” he was impressed, in the case of his film, by the collective spirit of “uniting for a common cause, to make music or to overcome grief.”
The film, whose actors are all Galician, as are 90% of the technical team, masterfully tells the story of a coastal town still devastated by the shipwreck of one of its fishing boats, from which only two crew members were rescued.
The re-formation of the regional Rondalla, a popular traditional music group in which several of the castaways participated, acts as a catalyst for overcoming this trauma, thanks to collective effort and collaboration – ideas that the film foregrounds.
For a “native Madrider with Cantabrian blood” like Sánchez Arévalo, it was “quite a challenge” to shoot in Galicia, as he wanted to make a feature film “very local and very from here”, just as British comedies “talk about very specific places with very specific accents”, but then “are films that become universal”.
“I didn’t want to tell a film from above, but on the same level as what I was telling and with whom I was telling it. That’s why the cast had to be 100% Galician,” he emphasizes.
As a result, he felt “very well supported” at all times to ensure that “everything that happened in front of the camera, despite being fiction, had as much truth as possible.”
For this reason, he shot with barnacles that were real, with rondalleiros that were, and in the team there was a linguist who unified the Galician accents of the actors so that they came from “the specific area” in which they were shooting, mainly from the Pontevedra town of A Guarda and its fascinating landscapes, where the team lived together for months.
“At the end of the day you have a collaborative art and this whole network around me made me feel very safe,” something that the entire cast also highlighted.
The filmmaker admits that he loves “character stories,” which for him “always come before plot” and “mixes drama with comedy.”
“I always like to add a lot of ingredients and mix them together so that it’s like a journey where everything is mixed together. What I like most, even as a viewer, is that they make me laugh and cry. And if they do that at the same time, then you’ve already convinced me.”
Sánchez Arévalo, who has been making films and other audiovisual projects for platforms for many years, says that he “grew up in theater and cinema” and that he is very worried that going to the cinema “has ceased to be a habit and has become something more extraordinary.”
“I wanted to try to make a film with a decidedly popular character, a family-oriented but adult film that could attract people and get people in their seats, because it’s something that worries me: the feeling that it’s having less and less impact in commercial cinemas,” he says.
For now, he has won over the 3,000 spectators who saw him in the Velodrome of the San Sebastián Film Festival and the hundreds who attended the preview in Vigo and left the cinemas thrilled and enthusiastic.
“Rondallas” will premiere across Spain on January 2, 2026. EFE
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