‘Historias del buen valle’ San Sebastian Review: José Luis Guerin’s Ode to Community

As a kind of cinematic and human balm amid so much circulating cruelty, Historias del buen valle is an ode to community. The film portrays the small neighborhood of Vallbona, on the outskirts of Barcelona, home to no more than 1,400 people. Economically, it’s a modest area, but also a privileged ecosystem shaped by issues that could be pulled straight from the nightly news: highway construction, environmental destruction, migration, pollution, and even the once-unthinkable threat of “gentrification.”

But at the heart of José Luis Guerin’s cinema—here as in the work of his admired John Ford—is the portrait of a living community: diverse, imperfect, sometimes conflicted, yet always inclined toward collaboration and resilience. When an elderly man offers help to a woman in need (“anything you need, you know where I live”), and it’s clear he probably has more trouble walking than she does, you realize Vallbona operates under a code of values that today can feel almost outdated.

Guerin’s portrait may sound idealistic, but he doesn’t ignore the difficulties: school bullying, tensions between groups, the usual frictions of any neighborhood. What he chooses to foreground instead is the determination of working people who arrived in waves over different decades and from many corners of the world, trying with minimal means to build a space for shared life. The villains, if there are any, remain off-screen, showing up only in the guise of “officials” pushing misguided notions of progress.

Vallbona’s residents come from Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Arab world, Africa, India, Portugal, Roma communities, and other Spanish regions. They are, as the film describes them, “people of the South.” Through their anecdotes and stories, Guerin assembles a mosaic of a neighborhood cut off by a river, a bridge, a highway, and train tracks, where a polluted lagoon stands as a cautionary landmark. It’s only a half-hour drive from Barcelona, yet at times it feels like another planet.

The film unfolds through this patchwork of testimonies: a man weeps for his late wife, with whom he once won tango competitions, his grief overwhelming the screen; another points out where his demolished house once stood; another shares his obsession with talking to plants (many in Vallbona do, and to animals as well, though they assure us they never answered back). Groups gather by the river to play music, sing, and dance—a throwback to a communal way of inhabiting public space that grows rarer by the day.

What Guerin achieves, through these fragments of everyday life, is a cinematic counterpoint to the global culture of individualism, confrontation, and hate. He reimagines what was once an “old neighborhood” as one that has adapted to social and cultural changes without losing its core: solidarity, not as a badge for social media but as a lived practice.

In Historias del buen valle, people care for one another because it is part of their nature, ingrained in how they were raised. The virtual world may try to convince us that society is nothing but endless confrontation, but if you step outside and really pay attention, you’ll see it isn’t so. Guerin shows us that other possibility: a world that is humanist, dignified, and full of solidarity.