Nine years after the attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils, Cronos delves into the 124 hours following August 17, 2017, to reconstruct one of the largest police operations in recent Catalonia history. But its director, Fernando González Molina, insists that the film is not born from the desire to revisit horror, but to understand how those who had to face it experienced it.
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“I had many doubts about whether to make this film or not,” he admits during the interview with the film team. The decision to accept the project came after setting two non-negotiable principles with screenwriter Alberto Marini: “To be as faithful as possible to reality and to have respect for the victims.”
“The film talks about coexistence, empathy, and reconciliation,” summarizes Enric Auquer
Marini believes that the passage of time has left a complex relationship between Barcelona and those events. “It is a wound that closed, but without healing,” he maintains. “It feels like something huge happened and we move forward without fully processing it.” That is why he believes the film can contribute to a pending conversation: “Maybe it is advisable to reopen the wound to be able to heal it properly.”
Far from focusing on the perpetrators of the attack, Cronos places the focus on those who had to manage the emergency: police officers, healthcare workers, political leaders, and anonymous citizens.
“We did not know the terrorists. Just as those who pursued them did not know them,” explains Marini. “What we could tell was how normal people reacted to something that overwhelmed them.”
For González Molina, that perspective was fundamental. “Cinema helps me understand,” he states. “The film places you in front of reality from different prisms and provokes questions.” The director assures that his main obsession was to understand how those involved felt and to convey that emotional experience to the viewer.
The actors agree in highlighting the emotional weight of the project. Diana Gómez, who plays a character inspired by the then communication head of the Mossos d’Esquadra, Patricia Plaja, explains that she tried to find a balance between the real person and the dramatic dimension of the character to bring the audience closer to those events.
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Mónica López emphasizes that, before accepting the role, she needed to understand what kind of film the team wanted to make. “I was interested in knowing how the victims were treated, the memory, and everything behind the story,” she explains.
Enric Auquer considers that the film arrives at a particularly significant moment. In his view, the response to violence cannot be built from hatred nor from the stigmatization of entire communities. “It talks about coexistence, empathy, and reconciliation,” he summarizes.
The Liceu embraces the ‘premiere’
Cronos was pre-screened yesterday afternoon at the Liceu in the presence of various authorities – including the Interior Minister, Núria Parlon, and the President of the Parliament, Josep Rull – and the film team. This dramatic thriller starring Enric Auquer, Diana Gómez, and Mónica López and directed by Fernando González Molina reconstructs the operation of the Mossos d’Esquadra to arrest the jihadists who attacked on August 17, 2017, in Barcelona and the following day in Cambrils. The chosen location for the premiere is no coincidence: the van driven by the terrorist Younes Abouyaaqoub stopped just meters from the Liceu after fatally running over about fifteen people. The film premieres today for all audiences. / Àlex Tort
The film avoids explicit images and opts to reconstruct the tension of those days through police investigation and the experiences of its protagonists. González Molina admits that the project caused him “a lot of fear” due to the temporal proximity of the events and the responsibility of working with real testimonies.
“The important thing was not to show more images of the attack,” he explains. “The viewer already knows them. The important thing was to understand how those who were there felt.”
The result is a thriller that aims to work as suspense cinema, but also as an exercise in collective memory. A film that, according to its creators, does not seek to explain the terrorists, but to understand how a society reacted when terror broke into the heart of Barcelona.
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