Camarón tells you ... in a prison in Cádiz | Culture

The 1,400 prisoners of the Puerto III prison (Cádiz) are accustomed to watch movies on the big screen, but with crossed conversations of a disturbed public, thirsty for the forbidden and that takes advantage of the darkness in a criminal with a thousand eyes. However, the ambient noise vanished the day before yesterday. He started the last film about Camarón, and the first complaint of the cantaor set a pinch to many spectators that lasted almost two hours. "In 21 years I have never seen the public so quiet and respectful," a veteran intern confided to the director of the film, Alexis Morante.

The first ole erupted two minutes later and when the lights came on, many inmates battled in a thousand battles had their faces broken, broken. His messiah, José Monge Cruz, had flown 26 years after his death with his absent and prodigious voice to cross those insurmountable walls and sing like naide two steps from his cell.

"I lived in those island shacks of La Isla [San Fernando, donde nació Camarón]. I wish I would return to that world and to that time without light in the hill, where the houses had no doors and there were only curtains. And there Shrimp It arrived and changed everything. Everything ", repeats dazzled Diego," with three children out "and who, like everyone, avoids the surname as the stigma that jail gives. Beside him his friend Francisco, also an islander, remembers 40 kilometers from home, a sidereal distance: "I was at the funeral with 14 years old and for me he was already a God".

That sequence in the cemetery, between a generalized delirium, is the start of the documentary Camarón: flamenco and revolution, that tells the life of this magician of the compass that revolutionized the jondo and lived so fast as to pass away at 41 years old.

The film was screened the day before yesterday as an activity of the Trojan Horse Permanent Education Center in the prison of Puerto III and the 240 spectators cheered Morante and his producer, Antonio Martínez, to those who looked with a devoted air.

There were nerves before the start and the inmates stood up nonstop while the guards cast severe glances. If the previous films The world is Ours -That recounts the adventures of two young sevillian robbers- brought laughter, and Contramarea - about the drama of the refugees in Lesbos - left them overwhelmed, Camarón's documentary produced an emotion and drunkenness of roots, quejíos and nostalgia, in the delivered and diverse public, of 17 different modules. "You can not even imagine the half-meter tattoos of Camarón that some have on their backs," said Nines Ogallar, director of the prison's senior school.

Nominated to the Goya for the best long documentary the day before his screening in prison, the film disembowels the art of this gifted singer, his origins, his take-off and the audacity of flamenco breaking with the record The legend of time as a milestone. But also its relationship with drugs, hence the connection with the prisoners. Salud, prey with blond hair and open smile, explained desolate after the movie: "I have it in my blood. I fell very young in the drug, with 13 years and I have only left with 43. But I have never been punctured. And when I've seen Camarón in the last, how he wants to live and can not, well ... "

And in that episode the poetry of the narrator helped the magic, the actor Juan Diego, who chained with metaphor one metaphor after another: "Flamenco has always needed something to help the singer to widen that gap in the chest and give the soul a little push to go up the throat". During the footage, without current interviews and only with archival images, the fragile figure of Camarón was accompanied by the smoke of his three daily packets of cigarettes and in the end, the lung cancer that ended with him.

To make matters worse, the film includes the lethal traffic accident that caused Camarón one year of condemnation. The mutism continued, grew, impressed the organizers of the event. "I have never seen so much silence, and that there were interns of all the modules, even with sanctions without canceling," said Cecilio González, deputy director of security at the jail.

Morante (Algeciras, 1978), recently arrived from Los Angeles, where he lives, said that the reception of the public had seemed "brutal". And praised the collaboration of the family of Camarón to bring order to the material of four decades of success, and soon will be in the new museum of his hometown. "There in front of the house, in a garage, they left us with fetishes, two Grammys, thousands of cassette tapes and about 30 VHS," he recalled. "We digitized them just before throwing them away because they had mold and they are the ones that bring the unpublished images with Camarón on horseback and other domestic scenes," he explained. Apart from the home material, the film drinks from 60 different suppliers, mainly TVE and Canal Sur.

"Who is there in Spain like Miles Davis or Jim Morrison, with an overwhelming personality that changed a part of society?", Questioned the director about his protagonist.