Rafa Russo, director of ‘The Year of Fury’: “Something untamed in the human spirit makes us stand up in rebellion”

10/25/2020.- Director Rafa Russo presented his second feature film, The Year of Fury, this Sunday at the RTVE Gala hosted the Valladolid International Film Festival for the third consecutive year. Duruing the movie’s  the presentation, the director was joined by the actress Sara Sálamo, the producer Juan Gona, and Elena López Pisonero, the deputy director for Films and TV Movies of Televisión Española.

The director and screenwriter Rafa Russo is a regular at Seminci, where he presented his short films years ago. In this edition, which he describes as “an act of resistance”, he has brought us his latest work, a story set in Uruguay in 1972, at the beginning of a military dictatorship that would last until 1985.

With this film, Rafa Russo intended “to tell what happened then so as not to make the same mistakes now” since, according to him, the movie’s story has many contemporary parallels.

For him, the important thing was not simply to tell what happened then, but to show how ordinary people cope with  such turbulent episodes. “It is very difficult to be a hero; the only thing one can aspire to do in a situation like this is to try to maintain integrity and dignity, because the dictatorship pervades everything.”

For the film, Russo has had a luxury cast formed by  Spanish, Uruguayan and Argentinian actors such as Alberto Amman, Maribel Verdú, Daniel Grao, Joaquín Furriel or the above-mentioned  Sara Sálamo.