Milo and Pablo are the custodians of a piece of cinema history. In a discreet warehouse in the rural neighborhood of Sárdoma, in Vigo, Baños Films, the most important film distributor in the northwest, beats, among parcel delivery plants, paddle tennis courts, bread ovens, industrial supplies, mechanical workshops, and a vertical cultivation laboratory. The brothers Milo and Pablo came here by inheritance and carom. One studied History and the other, Teaching, but they ended up getting hooked on the company that his grandfather, Emilio Baños, created in 1953.
Decorated with portraits of the great stars that the founder admired, Baños has been the only surviving company in this territory for years, from when films were distributed in rolls that totaled more than a kilometer. Feature films – but also trailers and even No-Do – traveled inside metal or plastic boxes, packaged in a custom-made white canvas bag reinforced with a wooden base, on board the train or in the trunk of the regular bus (in Galicia, such as the Castromil or the Auto Industrial), rotating through that constellation of cinemas that dotted the country and were the main form of leisure.
Today the 35 millimeter format, except for exceptional events, is not used and the rolls hibernate in the shade—the higher up on the shelves, the older the titles—waiting to be recycled as industrial material. In Baños Films, which in a few weeks will free up many square meters, unnecessary after the digitalization of commercial cinema, countless old promotional posters of remembered or forgotten films are also kept. Now, says Pablo, the most nostalgic of the brothers, “there are 15 premieres a week”; everything is lighter and flies. Before, every new feature on the billboard was an event that absorbed the family’s energy for a long time. The movies had to be loaded and downloaded; bring them from Madrid, where the copies were made; taking them to the last corner, rotating them between cinemas, with date commitments that were a feat to fulfill. “And we moved them with pure muscle, we didn’t need a gym,” Milo jokes.
That was a two-speed world—or a stalls—that seems very distant but that lasted until the end of the first decade of the 21st century. Many months passed between premier and the projection in smaller towns. “Now it is released anywhere simultaneously with Madrid, because technically it is possible,” say the brothers. But before, very few copies of each release were made, possibly only seven, for the seven Galician cities, because each one was around the equivalent of 1,000 euros, in such a way that each film rolled around the map until exhaustion. And again and again they had to return to the distributor, to be treated in the Baños Films workshop—often at the hands of Pablo, the youngest—of the war wounds with which they were returned after so much trotting.
Emilio, the patriarch of the lineage, “was a brutal fan of cinema, and he identified closely with Cinema Paradiso“recalls Milo, whose first name is also Emilio, like his father, now retired, and his grandfather. The latter’s life, indeed, was a movie story: He started as a child selling candy at the door of a cinema, and became an institution in Galicia, the man who brought the seventh art to every theater (also outdoors, when no one else did), in that golden age in which any town had one or two screening spaces. It is no small thing, if you take into account that Galicia is a territory atomized to infinity, with 313 town councils and almost half of the population entities of Spain linked by labyrinths of roads.
So much so that Emilio Baños II, son of the founder of Baños Films and father of Milo and Pablo, had to spend an entire week visiting his clients in some Galician regions such as O Barbanza, with only four town halls. That splendor has now been reduced to 37 locations throughout Galicia. And, furthermore, everything is now distributed on a hard drive, or by satellite, or (in a minimal part) on blu-ray. Between 2008 and 2012, the last rooms underwent their metamorphosis. And they said goodbye to the heavy 35 millimeter tapes that had to be mounted on the reels and then exchanged on the projector while the viewers obeyed, without question, the sign that appeared on the screen: Visit our bar. These films were as romantic as they were cumbersome, as delicate and expensive as they were hardly democratic. Because months passed before they reached small places, sometimes cut down due to repairs.
When a premiere was a hit, “in the villages they would tear their hair out,” Milo Baños jokes. “It happened, for example, with Titanic”which arrived in the cities “after Kings, on January 8, 1998”, points out his brother, “and until April 5 it was not projected in Vilagarcía”, considered the “eighth city” of Galicia. People “couldn’t stand it”; “I went on weekends” to the big towns. No one wanted to wait to see how love emerged between Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in the midst of the shipwreck.
That legacy that awaits its final farewell in Galicia—five, six, seven rolls and between 20 and 40 kilos per feature film—preserves more or less well-known titles in its cans, often labeled by hand, with white paint, because the passing of the years devoured the labels. Breakfast on Pluto, Terror in the convent, King Kong, The Drunken Kung Fu Master Cat…More than the (highly flammable) celluloid, what is abundant here is cellulose acetate (which replaced the first support from the 1950s) and resistant polyester (from the 90s). Some works will be saved from destruction, and specifically the Galician ones, which will go to archives such as the Axencia Galega das Industrias Culturais. The company’s own website highlights its commitment to the dissemination of productions born in the community.
The story of the Baños lineage and all this treasured footage began with the passion of a child, fatherless, for cinema. When his father was missing, Emilio Baños (Vigo, 1924-2007) had to go to work as soon as he turned nine. And he signed up for everything: to deliver newspapers, to shine shoes, to sell churros, or to serve as a helper in a barbershop, a bakery or a body shop. Until at 15 he started selling candy at the door of several cinemas in Vigo, such as the Rosalía and the Royalty, and the teenager began to forge his dream.
The film businessman Isaac Fraga hired him as a bellboy at the García Barbón theater, and he worked in different cinemas as a ticket taker and usher, as a booth assistant and as an operator since 1941. It was not called Cinema Paradiso, but it was called Cine Maravillas, in Bouzas (Vigo), the place where, already as a projectionist, he met Ana María Márquez, whom he married in 1945. His son Emilio, the successor, was born the following year in front of Maravillas. “Except directing films, my grandfather did everything” in the world of cinema, Milo says when asked about his life. “He was an extra, he was a representative of artists, he even collaborated with No-Do,” he lists. He was a producer, importer and managed several cinemas, the same thing that his grandchildren have now begun to do in collaboration with several fairly populated town councils that stopped having commercial cinema years ago. They are the municipal halls of Verín, A Rúa, O Barco (Ourense), As Pontes and Muros (A Coruña). “We are reopening cinemas where there were none,” they say with satisfaction, “it is a very interesting and expanding public service.” It is also the umpteenth expression of the love that his grandfather professed: “When he was old,” Milo remembers, “he would get up in the morning and start watching movies.”