What is a Renault Clío? For Leonor Paqué is his house, his documentary editing study, his refuge, a combat car with which he traveled to hell and heaven. But that little car – Model II White phase – did not become all that until December 27, 2021. That day, Paqué told in the country his devastating history: with eight years he was admitted with tuberculosis in the Santa Marina Child Sanatorium, in Bilbao, and there he suffered the abuses of a pedean priest of which he did not remember his name. That was 50 years old, but the psychological sequelae remained indelible as a tattoo. It was one of the few women who until then had publicly denounced sexual abuses in religious spheres.
His strength and courage caused other people to count their case. Seeing his faces propelled him to meet him: “I had to meet with those people I did not know. So I conditioned my car, I took a video camera and started up,” he said passionately in a cafeteria in the upper zone of the Madrid neighborhood of ambassadors.
He did not have resources to make a documentary in a big way and, as if that were not enough, driving was something that always terrified him. So Paqué, writer and journalist, asked his brother Diego for help to turn his clío into a space to live in a few square meters with ink, his inseparable mestizo dog of cinnamon color. Diego, musician and film director, proposed to accompany her to record the trip and direct the project. As the car didn’t give for more, he would sleep in a tent. It was a trip to the unknown. In one of the first shots, in fact, Leonor is listened to say: “We don’t know where we will arrive.” The journey was extended for three years, visited 32 destinations throughout Spain and loaded the memory of their two cameras with tens of hours. Fruit of all that is the documentary Sister Leonor. 20,000 kilometers of confession.
The film, pending its premiere, is currently registered at various film and international festivals. “We hope that some compromised distributor sends the documentary to the greatest number of people, due to their truthful and essential content,” say its creators, who self -financed the idea with their small Latinvisual producer. Rodar, they say, it was a hard work, full of difficulties, but that has led to a valuable, unique file, an radiography of what the victims feel, brought to light by another victim. It is a fight in which a handful of boxers hit a sack, that of silence, cover -up and revictimization of the Catholic Church.
Paqué meets people who does not know, but with whom he intimate quickly. “I don’t understand what was happening. It’s as if we connected. As if her sister,” explains the journalist. What initially seemed a single path transmuted into a framework of trails that bifurcan. One of them was that of Emiliano Álvarez, the first victim who was showing his face in the investigation that this newspaper launched in 2018. The priest Angel Sánchez Cao abused him between 1976 and 1978 at the Minor Seminar of San José de la Bañeza, in León. For him, that was “the slab of fear” with which he had to carry his whole life and that led him to the heroine.
He overcame all that and when Paqué interviewed him he still sought justice, while suffering from terminal cancer and recovered the lost time in his town, raising goats. “When I talked to him, in Borrenes, he said that after counting it it was when he had started to live. He said: ‘If I had died years ago, an Yonqui had died. Now a person will die.” Álvarez died in August 2022, three months after the interview.
Burn back
Counting again the pain suffered by abuse is not easy. It is to burn with the embers of a memory that has never turned off. Paqué Hilvana all stories to create a collective memory. Where his is also enough, fragmented because he does not know the identity of his abuser. Part of that trip will help you find those fragments to rebuild the whole truth.
The journalist delves into her interviews in the depth of the problem: the truth of what happened, but also that what continues to happen, how the Church continues to deny in most cases a repair. An example of this is the story of Oscar, who suffered abuses in the nineties at the Zaragozano Seminar in San Gabriel de Zuera, of the Order of the Pasionists. He spent all his childhood with the abuser and the cover -up and ordered priest in that same order. After dedicating his life as a missionary in El Salvador, he denounced a few years ago what happened before the superiors. These proposed electrochic therapy to “cure” their homosexuality, and denied a repair. At the time of the interview he tried to leave the clerical state, but fails to get a job outside the congregation and has no right to any unemployment compensation. “I am a priest in hell,” he explains with pain in the movie.
The 102 -minute documentary describes how those affected live their day to day with that wound. A 73 -year -old woman tells Paqué who named the abuse while she was in the cinema, seeing Bad educationby Pedro Almodóvar. He was 55 years old. “They did that to me,” he describes in front of Diego’s goal.
On that trip the laughs intermingle with the scars, many of them are vestiges of a long recovery process. On that cure, Fernando García-Salmon talks about the need to tell it, of the therapeutic that was for him to name the violations he suffered at age 14 for a Claretian in a boarding school in Madrid. He also talks about the difficulties of managing this suffering with being homosexual, sexual orientation that the Church has been in charge of demonizing throughout its history and linking it to the pedophilia scandal. “For society it is difficult to dimension what happened to us,” he says.
The documentary not only covers the meetings, but the events that took place from the end of 2021 until the end of 2024: the investigation of the Ombudsman, the scandals uncovered by the Church or the meetings of the bishops with the victims at the headquarters of the Spanish Episcopal Conference. “What I want is justice,” a victim who committed suicide because of the sequelae of having suffered abuse by a cleric is heard in that meeting in 2022.
Paqué, together with ink and Diego, mounted on the clío turned into a motorhome to record a trip that could encapsulate the truth of the abuses. “I consider that counting is a weapon, a valuable tool,” says the journalist. He handled his flyer thousands of kilometers to feel free, to try to take that freedom to his interviewees and to deliver it to the spectators of his documentary.