‘La Guitarra Flamenca De Yerai Cortés’ Review: A Musician Turned Filmmaker Finds Melodrama And Healing In A Gitano Family’s Buried Truths

Known in the music world as C. Tangana, Antón Alvarez caught audiences off guard in 2024 with this documentary, his debut as a filmmaker, which now arrives on streaming platforms. La guitarra flamenca de Yerai Cortés is a sincere and deeply moving immersion into Gitano culture, told through the life and experiences of Cortés, a flamenco guitarist preparing to release an album (named after the film). Alvarez’s cameras follow him as he returns to his hometown to meet his relatives and tell their story, or rather their stories.

It all starts with an anecdote Alvarez himself tells to the camera, sitting in a bar. He recalls meeting Cortés at a party and being stunned the moment he heard him play. Talking to him, he learns the story behind the album the musician is about to record, and he wants to dig into it. That is the film: a full-on dive into Cortés’s family life, accompanied by music. Several of the musical scenes could easily work as music videos, in the spirit of the hit at-home Tiny Desk that Tangana himself put together during the pandemic.

What is truly fascinating, though, is Yerai’s own story and his relationship with his parents, who are estranged and no longer speak to each other. As we get to know each of their versions, other family secrets slowly come to the surface, only to be fully revealed near the end. Meanwhile, Cortés copes with a life lived halfway between Madrid and the Gitano community where he grew up (he’s originally from Alicante), and with a Madrid-born girlfriend who is also part of this family plot, and of this family drama.

While we learn the family’s stories, which with their secrets, lies and betrayals at times feel lifted from a telenovela, the film offers a number of musical numbers, most of them shot in the streets with the musicians, singers, dancers, relatives and friends who surround Cortés. The story takes shape in the connection between the family drama, the heart-on-sleeve interviews and the music, which so often serves to release those tensions and traumas.

The film recalls the documentary work Isaki Lacuesta has done in the world of flamenco, such as La leyenda del tiempo and Entre dos aguas, mostly in the honest, straightforward gaze with which it tells its story. Here, however, Alvarez stays closer to pure documentary than Lacuesta does, structuring his interviews as conversations and leaving room for his own participation, both asking questions and appearing in one of the film’s subplots, which leans on his fame and success.

Part musical, part family melodrama (Yerai’s mother is a fascinating character), La guitarra flamenca de Yerai Cortés is much more than a visual companion to the guitarist’s album of the same name. With a creative visual approach, made up of restrained long takes and very good use of 16mm, Alvarez delivers a film whose value stands on its own, a humanist yet honest, even raw exploration of the artist and his family. From there, the director draws a portrait of a community and a world in constant transition, where tradition and modernity blend in unexpected ways. It is also a story of healing, of wounds left open for far too long finally beginning to close.