Seven screenwriters have resigned in the last year from the Board of Directors of the Film Academy and from the institution’s script commission due to the presence among them of Luis María Ferrández González, who was accused by six women of different sexual assaults, including four of his students. Among those resigned are the two script members of the current Board of Directors, Carlos López and Virginia Yagüe, who is also president of Dama, the intellectual rights management entity for screenwriters.
For some time now, among those who led the screenwriters at the Film Academy, there was deep discomfort because the institution had not managed to remove Ferrández, director of the feature films, from its governing bodies. The wounded screen (2014) y The night an intern found Emiliano Revilla (2016), candidate for the Goya for best short fiction in 2011 for Hemisphere, and professor at both the Francisco de Vitoria University and the TAI School of Madrid. In February 2021, elDiario.es published a report with the testimony of six women who did not want to give their names in which they described different sexual assaults. Two of them had been his students at TAI and two others at Francisco de Vitoria. In the same article, the filmmaker rejected all the accusations, for which he was not prosecuted. The Francisco de Vitoria University, for its part, carried out an internal investigation that closed after finding “no reasons” to remove him from his job. However, Ferrández left the university.
Two of those who resigned declared to EL PAÍS that “it was a delicate step but one that had to be taken after two years with Ferrández in a commission that did not function operationally due to his presence.” And they point out: “For us, the fact that six women have made these accusations public seems very serious and enough for Ferrández to stop collaborating on the Academy script commission.” One of the screenwriters who have left these bodies is Lola Salvador, a master in audiovisual writing, one of the first academics and National Cinematography Award winner in 2014.
This Wednesday, a statement from the Alma screenwriters’ union confirmed the resignations, chained in time as different screenwriters joined those who left the commission, and all of them were attributable to members of the script commission – which is still formed, according to the Academy’s website, which has not collected the resignations, by Carlos López, Virginia Yagüe, Luis María Ferrández González, Juan Luis Iborra, Natxo López and Gabi Ochoa (who entered the last elections last June)—notified the board of that report in which Ferrández “was accused by several women of having taken advantage of his role as a filmmaker and professor to sexually harass them.”
The statement continues: “The union’s code of good governance requires paying special attention to the teaching environment and the training dynamics in which there are situations of superiority, authority, admiration or influence (…). Therefore, at Alma we support the decision of our members and, like them, we consider that anyone who displays this type of behavior is not a worthy representative of our profession. And we publicly show our concern about events that require more forceful action.”
Due to the system of rotation of members on the Board of Directors, Ferrández should have joined it, but that fact did not occur, without any explanation for that absence. The Film Academy, contacted by EL PAÍS, assures: “When the Academy has something to say publicly, it will do so.” This Thursday the biannual Assembly of the institution is held, scheduled and planned for a long time.