Asbestos killed my mother

Asbestos kills in the long run. It is a product sold by the ton across the world to block heat, and paradoxically it has burnt the lungs of thousands of people living next to it. The Basque filmmaker Juan Miguel Gutiérrez felt irresistibly drawn to the trail of death left by asbestos in and around factories across the world.

But like so many other interests, for a long time it did not materialize into anything specific, but instead lay dormant, like a block of clay from which no amount of hammering can extract a shape. Privately, Gutiérrez suspected that sooner or later he would end up writing a script for a documentary on the topic, but it was not a priority and there were no deadlines. In fact, he had no clue how to go about it. But the more he read on the subject, the more he felt that he had to lend a voice to the victims. The horror he felt after reading the testimonies from survivors had practically convinced him that is was his ethical duty to do so.

"My film can be copied, pirated, requested and distributed free of charge"

Gutiérrez had already made 11 documentaries, the most recent of which was Zuzendu, mesedez! (or, Focus, please!) in 2009. So he set about creating the structure for a twelfth. It had to be a piece that would exorcize his own fascination for this topic and transform it into a story about the courage of thousands of people who were condemned to death for having breathed in the substance decades ago. Asbestos was used on a massive scale in North America and Europe until the 1960s, and in Spain until the 1980s. "The first 40 storeys of the World Trade Center towers in New York were completed in 1969 and contained asbestos. The rest did not," recalls Gutiérrez. In Spain its use was not banned until 2002.

Slowly but surely, Gutiérrez began putting together a basic script and started making contact with the first victims and experts. The idea was to follow the route of a product that left a trail of horror on its north-to-south journey, and on its flight from the West to the emerging countries of the East.

Then, one afternoon last January, Gutiérrez got a call from his brother Javier, the head of the food lab at Juan Mari Arzak's restaurant. Javier asked him straight out whether about what had really caused the death of their mother, Araceli Márquez.

"Are you sure mom died of lung cancer?" he asked. That was what their father had told them before his own death. But it was just possible that in 1980, after Araceli died in San Sebastián of a lung pathology that caused her terrible pain, the doctor might have simplified the diagnosis. Everybody, after all, was familiar with the word cancer.

Up until 1960, the Gutiérrez Márquez family had lived in the nearby town of Rentería, in a house near a square called Plaza de la Música. Several people he interviewed for the documentary remembered that the square went up over the former factory Paisa, Producciones y Aislamientos, a plant that Gutiérrez himself recalled perfectly. What he did not know was that the company made asbestos. That piece of information changed everything. That factory stood 10 meters from the family home, and it had a great fan working 24 hours a day, pointing straight at their windows. It could be a coincidence and have nothing to do with his mother's death, but the puzzle suddenly had new pieces. And it was as though the pieces wanted to slip into his movie.

These days it's easy to realize that it was not necessary for Araceli to be inside a factory in order to get sick. The fan of death was blowing the asbestos fibers right into her lungs. But just a few months ago, such a hypothesis was almost science-fiction. The concept of "environmental pollution" was recognized in a recent ruling by a Madrid court, which forced a company called Uralita to pay 3.9 million euros in damages to 45 residents who lived near the former Cerdanyola-Ripollet asbestos factory in Catalonia.

When the Gutiérrez brothers went back to the Oncology Hospital in San Sebastián to see whether they could access their mother's medical records, they were in for a shock: a full 30 years later, they learned that their mother had died from "pleural mesothelioma," a form of cancer that is strongly associated with asbestos.

In a matter of seconds, Juan Miguel Gutiérrez went from viewing this substance as a painful problem affecting other people to becoming another victim himself. It was at that moment that he decided that the title of the documentary would be La Plaza de la Música. He also decided that the shoot would begin right there, on the former location of the Paisa plant, next to the house where Araceli instilled in him a love of cinema by telling him in full detail about the movies she used to watch on Sundays. "It starts there, but it ends thousands of kilometers away. The world of asbestos does not end with each individual story," says the filmmaker.

The 70-minute film is a condemnation of those people who fail to take responsibility for using this product, and of the countries that fail to implement strict safety measures for the handling of asbestos. The story begins in Rentería and ends in India. The documentary was screened at this year's San Sebastián International Film Festival.

"It can be copied, pirated, requested and distributed free of charge," says Gutiérrez. "The point of it is to help put a stop to the bloodbath caused by asbestos."