Los brutos

About the show

“Violent, rough, lacking in consideration and civility”: this is the definition of “bruto” given by the Real Academia Española. And that’s how it is, in a manner of speaking, in Nito’s world: the neighbourhood where he lives, the people around him. Therefore, his entry into cinema school to study screenwriting led him to make the leap to another life: artistic, sophisticated.

This is the story of that journey and of what Nito leaves behind along the way: his best friend, his girlfriend, his family. Writing is what causes the loss and, at the same time, the only thing that may keep all that alive, if only in fiction.

Writer and director’s note

Sitting on a park bench, some friends and I started to fantasise about what we would be when we grew up. We all said something: policemen, football players, criminologists. All except one, Israel, who didn’t open his mouth. He was absolutely unable to answer. I remember looking at him and wondering how anyone could exist without a trace of imagination.

But that’s nonsense, I realise now. Even dogs have imagination. We know, because they dream.

According to a recent study, the dreams of dogs deal with two recurrent ideas: meeting other dogs on their daily walks, and the nightmare of their owners disappearing, leaving them alone. In other words, imagination, in dogs, in my friend and in anyone, reflects the reality we know. And Isra’s reality, I later found out, was so hard that it was difficult for him to imagine a future that was any different from what he knew then.

The thing is, exercising our imagination, putting it into practice, can turn out to be a violent, sometimes merciless, act. Just as film editors work with all the material that is shot – what they call “raw” (“bruto” in Spanish) – to extract the final cut, we end up abandoning – or betraying – that which we no longer need to get to where we want to go.

I, for example, stopped seeing Isra. Although almost as soon as we parted ways, leaving him alone, I started dreaming of him. So, like dogs, our relationship moved from day, or “real life,” to night, to the world of dreams. And this is partly what the work is about, it deals with what we try to leave behind and pursues is, appearing in our dreams, or, very similarly, in what we write.

Los brutos is a literary work with multiple storylines within the plot, a series of fictions interpreted by a few actors who give life to different characters. Some are sad, many others are funny. They all pursue all the same thing: to look for the exceptional in reality and protect it from the passage of time, prevent it from disappearing.

Roberto Martín Maiztegui