Good Valley Stories

On Barcelona’s edge, Vallbona lies enclosed by river, railway and highway. Antonio, son of Catalan workers, has tended flowers here for nearly ninety years alongside neighbours from many places. Through music, forbidden swims and budding romances, a quiet resistance emerges against urban change and social division.

José Luis Guerin: ‘The project spawned out of a commission from Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art, which I made super fast. But I was left with the desire to develop that work because I began to discover that the echoes and resonances of the entire world could be contained in this very small and humble neighbourhood. Therein lies the vocation I aspire to as a filmmaker: to find the universal perspective in local realities.

Neighbourhoods like Valbona feel somewhat universal, given that gentrification is a worldwide phenomenon. City centres are converted into tourist attractions, essentially becoming theme parks inaccessible to the local population. These are people who are then marginalised to the peripheries, where a more human, normal daily life remains. It’s a process we can recognise everywhere.

It is the same case with cinema itself, where the spaces that offer most freedom and creativity aren’t so much at the centre of the industry but on these peripheries.’

— Excerpted and adapted from Rafa Sales Ross, ‘José Luis Guerin Returns to San Sebastián With “Good Valley Stories”, Stands Against “Impoverishing Cinema” by Looking at Docs Solely as “Denunciation”’, Variety, 25 September 2025