Susana Guardiola: "Barcelona can be a world reference for peace"

Susana Guardiola (Barcelona, 1976) is a director, screenwriter, and producer. She has directed several documentaries related to social and political conflicts, but has also directed and produced musical documentaries, biopics, music videos, commercials, corporate videos, and television series. She has traveled to several countries and collaborated on various productions such as Man on the Moon, by Milos Forman.

Trained at the Film Workshop of the late Bigas Luna, Guardiola has now put all her energy into bringing forward the documentary Peace, it is possible, which not only involves the testimony of several Nobel Peace Prize winners but also features the Pope of Rome as the narrator.

--- What a moment to promote a documentary about peace, isn't it?

--- It's always a good moment, but now everyone is becoming aware that it is a current and fundamental issue. Not as a utopia, but as a necessity. Material, urgent, palpable. In the 60s, the concept could be approached in a more spiritual or philosophical key, but even John Lennon's Peace and Love was made while bombs were falling in Vietnam. Utopias are needed to advance, to have a direction, but it's no longer about that, but about putting things into practice.

--- It sounds very nice, but it also sounds very naive.

--- In the same way that we know how to organize ourselves to wage war, we must know how to organize ourselves to make peace. It is no longer a vague, abstract "no to war" that always appears too late. No, now it's about finding an effective, practical, and preventive culture of peace rather than a reactive one. It's not about excising tumors, but about having a healthy life. That said: now we know that, to make peace, above all, peace is needed.

--- Look how easy.

--- No, not easy at all. It's simply that you cannot build on chaos. There are a series of poorly resolved situations, perfectly identified: the unfulfilled decolonization processes, for example. Or the Balkans, which still have a very artificial solution. Conflicts cannot be resolved through artificial impositions. You realize this when you talk to women in small towns in Colombia, who set up a whole participatory process called "truth, justice, and forgiveness": it was about bringing a paramilitary or a peasant face to face, so that both could admit what had happened or what they had done. It's not peace at any cost, it's reparation and forgiveness. With the presence of mediators, of course. But they even developed dramatizations of scenes, recreations of lived situations, but the interesting thing is that this was done by the people, not the government.

--- And now a documentary with Nobel Prize voices.

--- I've been working on it for ten years, I already have a lot of material shot, but I hope to finish it soon. It's a documentary about soft power, about the tools that make you think, that inspire you, that create awareness. These weapons are what can be developed to disarm us; we cannot arm ourselves for peace without first disarming ourselves internally. The audience we want to reach is not primarily political leaders, but citizens. Look, I'll tell you directly: on October 1st in Barcelona, I, who wasn't planning to vote, got up to vote when I saw the scenes of police violence.

--- Ah. Do you think we were on the verge of an outbreak of violence?

--- Upon seeing the images on my social media, Jody Williams, Nobel Peace Prize winner 1997 for her fight against anti-personnel mines, wrote to me alarmed. I asked for her mediating help and she asked what they could do, and decided to contact eight other Nobel Peace Prize winners to write an open letter, addressed to both Rajoy and Puigdemont, titled Where is democracy in Spain now? Mediation and dialogue or more violence and alienation? The letter denounced the police action and proposed mediation to bring about a peaceful solution to the conflict: "a people that feels repressed rarely disappears silently into the night."

--- Wow, you were behind this?

--- It was made public just the day before October 10, eventually having 24 signatories (all of them Nobel laureates). I firmly believe that this situation could have led to real violence. In a conversation with José Ramos Horta, also a Nobel laureate and former president of East Timor (architect of peace in that country), I realized that nothing is that easy: in the case of Catalonia, for example, it lacked the element of "oppressed people."

--- The appearance, you mean.

--- Exactly. Having autonomy makes this international perception diminish, unless specific events like those of 2017 occur. Look at Ukraine: the conflict in the Euromaidán was already very visible, and even so, it was very difficult to avoid war.

"In Catalonia, having autonomy makes this international perception diminish, unless specific events like those of 2017 occur"

--- There are always two sides. Here the big issue is that, when you resort to violence, nothing can be done anymore. In the Ukrainian case, I see very clearly that there should have been dialogue before, and Putin, if he had arguments about nuclear threats or about NATO's precedents in Iraq, we would have listened to him. This is the great challenge and method, detecting conflicts in time and stopping them before it's too late.

--- So the documentary is indeed aimed at politicians.

--- And at citizens, I insist. The interviewees I present don't give you an abstract discourse of Peace and Love, but rather want to tell us how they did it in their specific cases, and why they succeeded. It is important to present results, success stories, to find a real and practical method. That's why I want the Pope and that's why I also want the Dalai Lama, because they are voices that disarm us. Even the enemy has a reason.

--- Reaching the Pope. Wow.

--- Our efforts are very advanced and he is determined to participate. We hesitated at first about whether it would imbue the documentary with too much Catholicism, but I believe that everyone knows that there is a branch of the Catholic Church, that of the current Pope, which is very open and tolerant. We reached him through the Argentine missionaries who worked with him, with Francis. He has received them up to three times, with the proposal in their hands, and he loved the idea of all the voices of the world uniting for peace. He himself offered to be the narrator.

"Everyone knows that there is a branch of the Catholic Church, that of the current Pope, which is very open and tolerant"

--- We had an appointment with him in May 2020, but it was suspended due to the pandemic and we were offered to speak with the Vatican's head of communication. Two weeks before the war in Ukraine broke out, they contacted the two missionaries to resume the project. Now it seems that, once the conflict is channeled, we will finally be able to do it. Of course: they have explicitly asked that the documentary can circulate through all missions, where there is no connection to streaming platforms.

--- Which platforms do you talk to?

--- Almost all platforms ask for the production to be finished. They guarantee distribution to more than 170 countries, but they wait until it is finished and well tied up. Netflix can offer a license, like a pre-sale, but we want to set the condition that they don't keep 100% of it, but allow us to distribute it to schools or universities. That it not only remains a product, but becomes a true transformative tool.

--- Barcelona and peace.

--- The first person to have the idea of "culture of peace" was Federico Mayor Zaragoza, with his foundation based in Barcelona. His concept inspired us to write the skeleton of the idea, to build a methodology of peace.

--- Explain it to me a little.

--- First: disarmament is fundamental. Second: there are still 18 countries to decolonize, a phenomenon that presents most armed conflicts. Third: Democracy. Fourth: it is necessary to guarantee education for all. Fifth: address the challenges of sustainability, respect for the environment and the lack of natural resources. Sixth: solve gender inequality problems. Seventh: diversity and multi-ethnic integration. And eighth: guarantee freedom of expression and information. Barcelona has been a pioneer in many of these aspects, it can be a reference, and our lesson is that, even when a problem is not resolved or makes you still feel uncomfortable, above all here we want peace. Resolve problems peacefully even when conflicts can be serious. In 2015, the World Summit of Nobel Peace laureates was held in Montjuïc, which has not been held in many other places: Bogotá, Yucatán, Hiroshima (the next edition) ... And I hope that soon it can also be held in Kyiv.

--- I don't know if the world of cinema is very peaceful, by the way.

--- Not at all. Even at the Sundance festival there are sharks, this is a very wild world, professionally speaking. We would like to be able to go to Sundance and the Berlinale, because if all goes well we will finish shooting this autumn. Now we have a greater urgency because, as we said, the issue of war and peace is very hot. We want to present the trailer at the UN headquarters next September, and in January, hopefully we can go to Sundance. At least my American co-producer, Justin Hogan, believes we have a chance to get in, although it's a lottery and the competition is very strong.

--- You want an explosive success.

--- We want an explosive success! Indeed.

--- World peace seems too good a story.

--- It's not, if you realize that the struggle is not global but individual. A war starts in the brain, even if the environment of that brain is at peace. World peace begins with oneself. The key is to reach the dynamic of peace for each viewer, and that despite the fact that these have been the ten most violent years (informatively speaking) of my life. I think: if it happens to me with my neighbor, with my brother, etc., what must not happen between countries?

"A war starts in the brain, even if the environment of that brain is at peace"

--- Oh, the topic. Look: I have come to the conclusion that the culture of peace must be led by women, because men execute very well, but women tend to reflect more. Especially on the consequences of our actions (what will happen to the children, to the families, to the future…?). I believe that a meeting of five female leaders would never end by saying "well, let's invade Ukraine!".

--- But conflicts, if not fought, are lost.

--- They are lost if you don't organize, which is something very different. We organized for the pandemic, right? The whole planet was infected, and those who best managed the situation were female leaders. I subscribe to the motto of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, former president of Liberia and also Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who said that women have already given men many opportunities. In fact, we, by not having been protagonists, know you better than the other way around. We are not better or worse, it's just that we have absorbed it since we were little and have seen that wars are mostly made by men. They are wars of turnips.

"Let's promote equal rights and opportunities but also equal attitudes"

--- Agreed, then let's promote equality of rights and opportunities, but also equality of attitudes. It's not so much "that women put themselves forward," although now is the time, a time when female role models are lacking, but rather that the attitudes of both genders come closer, enrich each other, and feed off each other. We cannot fail to consider what more than 50% of the global population, made up of women, might say.

--- The Pope, that kind and omniscient narrator, is a man.

--- God, if He exists, has no gender.