17/07/2025 - Filmed over three years in a suburb of Barcelona, the director's latest non-fiction feature offers a humanistic and peaceful look at life on the margins

Director José Luis Guerin (© Óscar F Orengo/Los ilusos films)

Almost a quarter of a century after winning the Special Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize at the San Sebastián Film Festival for En construcción (2001), a film for which he also received the National Film Award and the Goya for Best Documentary, José Luis Guerin (Barcelona, 1960) returns to the official competition at the Basque film festival (taking place from 19-27 September – read more) with Good Valley Stories. The festival describes the film as: “A sum of imaginaries, social conflicts, both generational and identitarian, as well as urban and ecological, but it is also a calm and humanistic look at today’s world.” 

Good Valley Stories, performed by natural actors (non-professionals), was filmed over three years, fostering a unique bond between the filmmaker and a diverse group of people. The film captures their desires and aspirations, their transformations and struggles. Set in Vallbona, a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Barcelona isolated by a river, railway tracks and motorways, the film portrays a place in transition from rural to urban life. It is a memoir born from survival and neighbourhood struggles. The film also aims to reveal ways of life that are only possible in this hybrid, wild space that remains unurbanized. 

According to Guerin, "The dreams and conflicts experienced by the characters in this film are recognisable in any suburb anywhere in the world. Life on the margins involves deprivation, but it also preserves unique traits, forms of resistance and ways of life that have disappeared from the centre. That is the most stimulating and ambitious challenge I face as a filmmaker: that a humble, little-known neighbourhood can reflect the whole world, just as observing a single leaf can reveal the nature of an entire tree.”

The Catalan director premiered his debut feature, Los motivos de Berta, at the Berlin Film Festival in 1984. This was followed by Innisfree (1990) and Tren de sombras (1997), both presented at Cannes: the former in the Un Certain Regard section and the latter in the Directors' Fortnight. Later, In the City of Sylvia [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2007) competed in Venice, where Guest [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2010) also participated in the Orizzonti section, and was later shown in the Zabaltegi-Special section at San Sebastián. His last film, made a decade ago, was The Academy of Muses [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: José Luis Guerín ­
film profile], which won the top prize at the Seville European Film Festival (more information here).

Good Valley Stories is a Spanish-French co-production between Los ilusos films - Jonás Trueba and Javier Lafuente’s company - and Perspective Films, owned by Gaëlle Jones and JL Guerin. The film will soon be released in Spanish cinemas, distributed by Wanda Visión.

(Translated from Spanish by Vicky York)