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In Argentina, we haven’t heard from Nevenka Fernández, and it’s likely that in Spain hardly anyone remembered her until the release of this documentary created by Netflix and titled that word, “Nevenka “. An exotic name and an Irish heroine whose director Maribel Sánchez-Maroto, has decided to delete the word “case” with which this 26 year old girl made the headlines for a few scandalous days in 1999. They promote the miniseries as the pioneer of #MeToo, the woman who 20 years ago, in a much more hostile context, faced power and won. But this documentary goes far beyond this demagogic podium where a few “first ladies” are selected to be overlooked.
The Nevenka affair takes place in Ponferrada, a town in the deep Spain of Castilla y León. It begins with harassment at work by Mayor Ismael Alvarez, continues with the resignation of the post of councilor and the criminal and public complaint. But it doesn’t stop there. It does not stop either when, against all expectations and against the popular feeling of the neighbors who defend the slandered poor, the young woman wins the case and the super powerful politician of the PP must resign from his post. Another pioneer: the first politician to be ousted for a sexual crime.
But that’s exactly where the story doesn’t end there, that’s where the most interesting thing about this authentic feminist documentary and thriller lies: you could risk the story only ending. when you have finished watching the documentary. The story was missing this step, and we are doing it together. The suspense is not in the facts but in the feelings and actions of each of the many people who intervene in the plot and whom the 20 years that have passed allow us to look back. Including us. It is precisely this urgent and intimate connection with all the spectators today that makes “Nevenka” an event, a political fact. A device that travels in time, recovers what was not taken into account and answers the most common questions. Why does a woman allow herself to be dominated? What words do we have? Who constitutes the predator network and the exit network? Meanwhile, he leaves something very difficult well marked out: the path of non-victimization of the victim, the construction of a heroine and the sequence that goes from indifference, from complicity to liberation.
“Dare to speak, dare to say that it has been a shame for a long time,” she reflected while preparing for the latest expertises. She said she didn’t want to admit it herself. But once he started, when he was encouraged to read his own words aloud, that liberation started to happen which continues to this day. “
CHRONICLE OF A CLOSED HARASSMENT
A spoiler alert fits here, although it is also true that what will be said in the next paragraph is revealed by the same documentary within the first 10 minutes. Because this mini-series divided into 3 episodes does not support the morbidity in what happened but in the way it happened, in what everyone felt at that time, the space between the doubts , shame, decision and consequences.
In 1999, Nevenka Fernandez, 26, a master’s student in economics, returned from a trip with her parents to find a message on the answering machine. A politician from the city council, a friend of the family, approaches his father to ask for an interview with the young girl. The meeting is in a bar, there this friend and the candidate for mayor, Ismael Alvarez offer a seat as an advisor. Great temptation. Nevenka accepts and appears third in the lists. On the one hand, the party needed female faces. On the other hand, the whole town assumes that the young, beautiful and intelligent girl was another lover of the capricious and womanizer already known Don Ismael.
Nevenjka later just had a relationship with the mayor. Here’s another piece of information that gets you down the points when you want to get out of there. From this break, a series of harassment, ill-treatment in public and secret rapes took place.
“Don’t be so pushy,” he told her when she refused. “This is how you don’t serve me asexually”, “You are very rigid, you have to give up yourself and learn to cum.” He would send her messages such as “My life could be more loving, like a Hello how did you wake up, even if you don’t feel it. “
Aside from a fall into the dubious metaphor of the orange fish being hunted by predatory fish inside an aquarium, the documentary’s aesthetic manages to give time gone by an entity of its own. The camera travels through the same places where the events that we will see in the archives took place. There is no fiction, the chairs, the desks, are still there, empty, as if asking for a return visit.
The door opened as her slim body shook. Over a thousand days had passed since his worst hell began in this department he had stepped on again, albeit planted in a different way. Today she is not alone and she has the power. It is neither economic nor political. She has the power of the certainty, the truth and the belief that “when you recognize the abuse it becomes impossible to cover, because it changes you forever”
The superimposed appearance of the three Nevenkas, the beautiful young woman who swears as an advisor, the destroyed young woman who reads the reasons for her resignation in front of the cameras and the current Nevenka who reads the text of the complaint with herself , shows that the word harassment has more complex meanings than expected. That judgment won did not prevent exile. This revenge is eaten cold but dignity is built in another way, that the pioneer of Me too ends the circle thanks to the current voices of Me too. Neither victim nor lonely heroine. The appearance on the scene of the many characters who helped her at the time, men and women, breaks the construction of the lonely and romantic heroine. But the most important. It is clear that this is not a case, that it is not an extraordinary story. It forces you to look side to side until you find in every country you look at it from, stories like this, plotted …
TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES
The three quotes in bold that appear in this note coincide almost completely with the words that appear in the documentary. But they do not belong to “Nevenka” but to the account of the complaint lodged in 2019 by the niece of José Jorge Alperovich, senator and three times former governor of the province of Tucumán and which was told by journalist Celina de la Rosa in January 2020 in this same supplement. The trial remains suspended. It is not a fanciful association. One story leads to another. And this is precisely what makes “Nevenka” an insistence on the side of justice, one more thread in the feminist fabric.
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