Evangelio mayor

Year2021 Duration138 min. Projection formatDCP ColourColour LanguageSpanish DirectorJavier Codesal PhotographyJavier Codesal EditorJavier Codesal, Julia Sieiro SoundJulia Sieiro, Manuel Bened Production Julia Sieiro, Javier Codesal

Selected filmography: Evangelio mayor (2021), Calavera resumida (2020), Evangelio en Granada (Meta) (2019), Testimonio de Frederman (2019).

World premiere

Evangelio mayor is almost entirely shot in the building which was being renovated in Madrid between 2019 and 2020 to house the Josete Massa LGTBIQ+ public residential care home for the elderly, the first of its kind in the world. The film takes advantage of the site under transformation to stage two things. The first is the lucid and harsh testimony of Ramón Barreiro, struck by AIDS in the early eighties and a survivor after many years of struggle and serious aftereffects. The second, a series of dialogues taken from the four Gospels (especially John's), in which elderly members of the LGTBIQ+ community cite “the old words anew and in a new way”, as one of the notices which can be read at the beginning of the film states. These brief scenes, a succession of frames which translate, paraphrase or gloss many of the episodes from the Gospels are designed to be “innocent among the innocent, blasphemous for the Pharisaic”. Provocation is by no means the primary intention behind showing them; nor are they composed of irony. Rather, the film understands that the biblical text, as the basis for rituals and stories shared by generations, is a vast framework or grand code which can be harnessed dramatically. This is what happens in Evangelio mayor, where the episodes from the Gospel serve to symbolise content which is as anti-doctrinal as the experience of life and death of LGTBIQ+ people, and particularly of the most vulnerable among them, the elderly. “Thou art a Man, God is no more, thy own humanity learn to adore," William Blake wrote in The Everlasting Gospel two hundred and fifty years ago. The people we see, hear and feel with materialised sensuality in Evangelio mayor go even further than Blake, for they urge us to admire the vivacity of their bodies and the warmth of their words beyond an incomplete adoration of the species and its timeworn genders.


Manuel Asín

Film produced within the framework of the "la Caixa" Foundation's Support for Creation program. 

Promoted by
Gobierno de Navarra
Organized by
NICDO
With the aid of
Con la financiación del Gobierno de España. Instituto de la Cinematografía y las Artes Audiovisuales Acción Cultural Española Plan de Recuperación, Transformación y Resiliencia Financiado por la Unión Europea. NexGenerationEU
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