Last May we present the short
film Las Joyas de la Corona
in the City Council of Les Corts, in Barcelona. In the midst of the applause, voices were heard saying: “An unforgettable experience”, “A dream come true: Being an actress and making a movie”, “At first we thought we were not capable … But we do…” They were the men and women protagonists of the story, a group of older people from the Casal Can Novell.
A year ago, we were invited to work in Les Corts to develop a project called The Great Elderly. From the beginning, everyone was willing to debate and analyze how it is represented in the media in the third age. The objective of this project was to make citizens aware of ageing through innovative methodologies that mix media criticism and audiovisual co-creation.
According to data from the INE, in 2050 people over 65 years of age will represent more than 30% of the total Spanish population. In addition, the birth rate in Europe has fallen while the percentage of older people is falling. The news warns us that octogenarians will reach more than four million by 2020. If this is reality, we may ask ourselves, how do we perceive older people?, how will new generations be able to take care of them if they do not know them, if they isolate them, if they look at them through stereotypes?
During the process of The Great Elderly, we go through the multiple realities, virtues and needs that surround older people, and from there we propose to dismantle the stereotypes that try to homogenize, infantilize and even hide their valuable contribution to society. Some of these stereotypes come from the mass media that represent older people as a social health burden or as isolated people who must produce pity.
To create new imaginaries, the group of La Gran Gent Gran was trained in various aspects, such as theater and scriptwriting. Thus we generate new discourses around the learning that comes with having overcome all the ages of life and reaching this stage in many different ways. Because, as the sociologist Dolores Juliano would say, “we envy ourselves as we have lived, one does not become another person in the vejez”.
Thus, in a participatory way, we premiered the short film The Jewels of the Crown , with families, neighbors and neighbors, to generate again criticism and debate, a cornerstone of our projects. We talked about the right to fall in love, and some women said, “It seems that we could not or did not have the right to fall in love.” “It seems that our children are upset…” Issues such as the right to decide were raised on the table and the cliché also arose of the difference in treatment and expectations we have about women and older men, who are not the same.
It was a very emotional meeting because the audience, encouraged by the group of La Gran Gent Gran, allowed themselves to be touched by history and new stories were generated that we are already including in the new edition of the project.
While the new season arrives, visit the website of La Gran Gent Gran, where you can see how we carry out this project behind the cameras of our first production.