Cronos: nine years after the attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils, a film about the collective response to terror

Nine years after the attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils, Cronos delves into the 124 hours that followed August 17, 2017 to reconstruct one of the largest police operations in the recent history of Catalonia. But its director, Fernando González Molina, insists that the film is not born from the desire to revisit the horror, but rather from understanding how those who had to face it experienced it.

“I had a lot of doubts about whether to make this film or not,” he admits during the interview with the film's team. The decision to accept the project came after establishing two inalienable principles with the screenwriter Alberto Marini: “Be as faithful as possible to reality and have respect for the victims.”

Marini believes that the passage of time has left a complex relationship between Barcelona and those events. “It is a wound that has closed, but has not healed,” he maintains. “It feels like something huge happened and we moved on without really processing it.” That is why he believes that the film can contribute to a pending conversation: “Maybe it is worth reopening the wound to be able to heal it properly.”

Far from focusing on the perpetrators of the attack, Cronos places the focus on those who had to manage the emergency: police, health workers, political leaders and anonymous citizens.

"We didn't know the terrorists. Just as those who were chasing them didn't know them," explains Marini. “What we could tell was how normal people reacted to something that surpassed them.”

For González Molina, that perspective was fundamental. “Cinema helps me understand,” he says. “The film places you in front of reality from different prisms and provokes questions.” The director assures that his main obsession was to understand how those involved felt and transfer that emotional experience to the viewer.

The actors agree in pointing out the emotional weight of the project. Diana Gómez, who plays a character inspired by the then head of communications for the Mossos d'Esquadra, Patricia Plaja, explains that she tried to find a balance between the real person and the dramatic dimension of the character to bring the public closer to those events.

Mónica López emphasizes that, before accepting the role, she needed to understand what type of film the team wanted to make. “I was interested in knowing how the victims were treated, the memory and everything behind the story,” he explains.

Enric Auquer considers that the film arrives at a particularly significant moment. In his opinion, the response to violence cannot be built from hatred or the stigmatization of entire communities. “It talks about coexistence, empathy and reconciliation,” he summarizes.

The film avoids explicit images and aims to reconstruct the tension of those days through the police investigation and the experiences of its protagonists. González Molina acknowledges that the project caused him “a lot of fear” due to the temporal proximity of the events and the responsibility of working with real testimonies.

“The important thing was not to show more images of the attack,” he explains. "The viewer already knows them. The important thing was to understand how those who were there felt."

The result is a thriller that aspires to function as a suspense film, but also as an exercise in collective memory. A film that, according to its makers, does not seek to explain the terrorists, but rather to understand how a society reacted when terror broke into the heart of Barcelona.