"Almudena Grandes had a clear opinion, but that doesn't mean she was sectarian."

"I imagine Almudena (Grandes) 's death as a long plane ride, with her head resting on mine," says poet Luis García Montero, who was the writer's partner from the time they met in the 1990s at an event against the Iraq war (both came from previous marriages) until her death in 2021. It is perhaps one of the most tender lines in the documentary by director Azucena Rodríguez , who has managed to compose a complex ( and, as they say, human ) portrait of her friend. We don't just know Almudena Grandes as a writer, but also for her love of Madrid, motherhood, and the way she cooked the bechamel sauce for croquettes.

But, in reality, Azucena Rodríguez had planned to make a different kind of documentary. She explains in an interview with El Confidencial: "I thought about the film when Almudena was healthy . At that time, what I wanted was to make a film about her and literature, but then the pandemic, illness, and death hit, and it couldn't be. I decided to take it up again with the help of Mariela (Besuievsky, the documentary's editor and producer), but it coincided with my grieving for her loss, and I was in a state of denial. It's a bit of a childish thing , but I spent months and months editing images of her in such a way that in the documentary, it didn't seem like she'd died. But that wasn't working, and I realized I had to accept and address the loss."

"I spent months editing images of her so that it didn't look like she was dead. But I realized I had to accept the loss."

For this very reason, the documentary interweaves images of Almudena speaking for that first documentary that never came to light with others of her loved ones, who speak of the loss. "Through Luis, I was also able to convey the most intimate dimension, the one that could have occurred if Almudena had been in the editing ; in the end, her children or her sister recount it. The most difficult thing for me was hearing and seeing her for eight or ten hours a day for months, two or three years. Because you forget she's not there. But for me it was paradoxical , wasn't it? Her constant presence only served to highlight, for me, her unauthorized absence. Irreversible, too."

When Almudena Grandes won at just 28 years old The Vertical Smile by The ages of Lulu , Her family didn't even know she'd been writing an erotic novel . As has been said on many occasions, this marked the literary career of such a young woman, but it was also surprising because the erotic novel was simply a justification for entering the hostile and complicated world of literature. We asked Rodríguez if this (which is seen in the documentary) had any personal impact on the writer: "No, I don't think so," she points out. " There's a first novel and that's it, Almudena, that's it, the novelist. She said it herself: with the tremendous success she had, they called her from television and everywhere. And it was this great success that made her stop and consider what she wanted to do, if she wanted to be famous or if she wanted to be a writer. And the paradox is that she ended up being a famous writer."

Madrid and the left were also two turning points in the life and work of Almudena Grandes. The first, of course, because she was always considered " the writer of Madrid ," somewhat following in the footsteps of Pérez Galdós. "She went from the concrete to the universal," opines the director. "She was certainly the writer of Madrid, because she was in love with her city and, as she said, they had a similar character: an ordered chaos. Madrid was the place where her stories took place, but they were absolutely universal."

And the second is even more logical. The publication of The frozen heart or the Civil War trilogy , novels that gave a voice to those who suffered repression during the war, are added to the statements she made during her lifetime: she never hid her support for the United Left and some of her controversies are well known. Perhaps the most famous of these was her ironic commentary on the rapes suffered by nuns at the hands of militiamen during the Civil War, which earned her strong criticism from authors such as Antonio Muñoz Molina. The fact that she did not hide her ideology ("Almudena Grandes represents the prototype of a 'charo', as opposed to a 'cayetana'," Beatriz Miranda once said in an article about her in El Mundo) led José Luis Martínez-Almeida , after her death, to question whether she deserved to be Madrid's favorite daughter. Vox did not participate in the tribute paid to her, accusing her of being sectarian, and the Twitter account Vox Vicálvaro "bid" her farewell by tweeting: "You have lived with hate and you have died with hate."

"She was in love with her Madrid and, as I said, they had a similar character: an orderly chaos."

Is it fair to accuse a writer of being sectarian when he or she has a political opinion (which he or she sometimes expresses in his or her books)? Should writers, in the first instance, be apolitical? "Writers are citizens too," explains Rodríguez. "They have a point of view, they're telling things from a place and giving an account of what's happening in the story they're creating. In that sense, they're taking sides, which doesn't mean they're sectarian or Manichean. Almudena took great care, because she was a great writer , to ensure that her characters had edges and complexities. The rather evil characters or those with a more pernicious ideology also had shining moments. It was about life; we're neither black nor white but a compendium of varied things. But we have a position and, as she said, she was a citizen of her country and had a very clear position vis-à-vis her country and the rest of the world . A political position. And she also had a loudspeaker and an extremely powerful ability to communicate and transmit. And she exercised it because it helped her understand the world's situation, to improve it, to make it a more just place."

Along with the poems dedicated to her by Luis García Montero, the comments from her daughter Elisa are the other sweetest and funniest part of the documentary. Every time the public has spoken about Elisa in the past, it was used to remind them of her sympathy for the Falange, as if this were a kind of divine justice against the dogma of leftist parents. In the documentary, there are no ideologies, and we only hear from a daughter who has lost a mother . "I shouldn't say this, but in this photo I have a mustache," she jokes at one point in the film, pointing to a baby photo. "Because I had a dark skin, I played the mule in the school Christmas pageant, while the blonde, blue-eyed girls played the angel. It didn't cause me any trauma, but my mother was very angry."

"We're deeply contaminated by the hateful and confrontational rhetoric we thought we'd overcome, but it's resurfacing on the right," Rodríguez points out. " Elisa has had her ideology , she's been changing, and she has her way of seeing the world. But above all that, she has a mother and a father and siblings and a life, a family, whom she always loves and who adore her, and everyone freely thinks what they want. And I think in that sense, it's a return of that tolerance we're starting to miss so much when the rhetoric gets so tense."

"As a novelist, he had many virtues, but I would highlight his ability to understand all of us humans, to analyze ordinary people."

Almudena Grandes said that she was left with the character of Ulysses from The Odyssey , a book her grandfather gave her when she was a child. She also said that in 1997 she realized that she " had always written the same story " and, to resolve this, she began a different approach to books: resolving them before writing them. "She was fascinating as a person, an absolutely genuine person," explains Rodríguez. "And as a novelist she had many virtues, but I would highlight her ability to understand all of us humans, to analyze ordinary people, and how great stories can be told through the construction, reproduction, and recreation of the lives of ordinary people. Sometimes, when we have great admiration for an artist, it seems that we ask them to be equally extraordinary as a person, and logically, that doesn't always coincide. But here, it does. Almudena was as extraordinary as her literature ." Almudena premieres this Friday, May 16.