Everyone knows the figure of Marisolbut very few know who he really was Pepa Flores. In 1985, when she was 35 years old, disappeared from the spotlight and has never appeared in front of the cameras again, in an unprecedented act by claim not only his anonymity, but also his identity.
In 2020, the Film Academy awarded him the Goya of Honor throughout his career. Everyone expected me to break his silence and go pick him up, but that wasn’t the case. His promise remained intact.
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This is precisely how this work begins documentary film directed by Blanca Torres titled Marisol, call me Pepawhich tries to delve into women beyond the childhood myth what it meant for Spain under Franco. But why now? “I think we owed it to them,” the filmmaker tells Infobae Spain. “Above all, analyze her figure from the eyes of the present to, precisely, reconnect with her.”
At that Goya Awards ceremony, the singer performed Amaia who honored her. It is one of the presences that appear in this work, precisely to give us the perspective of the new generations and how that iconic image of Spanish popular culture has been perpetuated in the collective imagination. “I started singing because of Marisol,” she says.
Josefa Flores González born in Malaga in 1948. I was a post-war girl from humble family who began participating in performances to help at home financially. She had a natural grace and talent, and within the organization of Choirs and Dances of the Women’s Section of the Falange traveled to Madrid in a show where the Leader.
There the producer discovered her Manuel Goyanes and signed her to become Prodigy girl. She took it to her house and, a year later, at only 12 years old, she would star in A ray of lightbecoming a true Social phenomenon. “It responded to the childhood fantasy of the dream factory in the middle of the nightmare of Francoism,” says the writer. Marta Sanz in the documentary. And, Marisol, it was all light and color.
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But behind that image that all the girls of her time envied, there was a wounded childhoodkidnapped and exploited. Throughout the sixties Marisol was filming film after film and making endless tours throughout Spain, Latin America and even the United States, where she appeared in the Ed Sullivan Show.
It was the perfect opening image that the regime wanted to sell at that time, but Marisol’s procession went inside. At age 15 she was diagnosed with a stomach ulcer caused by stress, but she was still immersed in that maelstrom.
In 1969 she married the son of her producer, Carlos Goyanes, with whom he had practically grown up, and from whom he would end up separating just three years later, generating a tremendous media stir. There she would begin her breakup with Marisol and her beginnings as Pepa Flores. “He was a character highly questioned by the modernity his decisions vital and political and I think that she still continues to be a woman who places herself in a very unusual and unaccommodating place,” continues the director. “It was viral when the term did not yet exist and, precisely in the era of social networks where everyone wants to expose themselves, she, before anyone else, chose the opposite.”
In Marisol, call me PepaBlanca Torres has also had the opportunity to to portray all one epoch and the change fundamental that our country through his figure. For this reason, the moment in which the artist attempted to claim his own voice and hugged the communism and the feminism in an act of struggle against the very system that was responsible for creating a product of an ideological nature.
It was the time when he met the dancer Antonio Gades with whom he would have three daughters, Maria Esteve (who would follow in his footsteps in the field of acting), Tamara Esteve and Celia Flores, singer. But, although she tried to disassociate herself from public life, her trail followed her. In 1975 she would appear in a report in the magazine Interview with her naked photographed by the one who had been her trusted portraitist, Caesar Lucas.
At that time, intellectuals like Francisco UmbralJuan Luis Cebrián or Juan Marse They were responsible for giving free rein to the objectification of the actress as a kind of ‘childish perversion’
For Blanca Torres, rescuing the figure of Marisol/Pepa Flores at this time is linked to the work of rediscovery that is being done, for example with female writers. silenced on a literary level. For this reason, the work of journalists such as Victoria Prego or the filmmaker Cecilia Bartholomew during the Transition.
In the documentary, in addition to the aforementioned Amaia and Marta Sanz, there also appears Elvira Lindo, Nativel Preciado, Cristina Almeida and his sister, Victoria Floresas well as the president of the Academy, Fernando Mendez-Leitethe producer Enrique Cerezo or the dancer Cristina Hoyos. “I wanted good narrators to build their legend and to have a personal story about how Marisol or Pepa Flores had been important in their respective biographies,” says Torres.
Today, Pepa Flores continues to be a mystery. “We never considered him appearing in the documentary, we knew that was impossible, because his decision to disappear has always been firm. We know, through his family, that he liked the work we have done, so in some way, that puts closure on this project.”
