Animal rights campaigners in Spain blast bullfighting film for ‘glamorising torture’

Animal rights campaigners condemned an award-winning Spanish film about bullfighting for “glamorising the torture of animals”.

Tardes de Soledad (Lonely Afternoons), a documentary about the star bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, won a Goya award, the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars.

The film has gone on show in cinemas across Spain as a recent poll showed 77 per cent of Spaniards opposed bullfighting.

Marta Esteban, of the Foundation to Help Animals, an animal rights group, said whatever the artistic merits of the film, it was designed to “glamorise the torture of animal for entertainment”.

“I refer to the Spanish saying, ‘even if a monkey dresses in silk, it remains a monkey’. In the context of bullfighting, I would rephrase it saying, ‘even if torture is dressed in silk, it remains torture’,” she told The i Paper.

The survey on bullfighting, carried out by the Fundacion BBVA, which is part of the second largest Spanish bank, also found 80 per cent were against hunting animals and another 82 per cent said they opposed the use of animals in public spectacles. Pollsters interviewed 2,033 people across Spain last month.

Spaniards are divided over bullfighting, with some regarding it as an essential part of the country’s culture while others see it as cruel.

Albert Serra, the film’s director who is an aficionado of bullfighting, said the film had impressed people despite protests by animal rights groups when it was shown at the San Sebastian film festival last year.

“There are many people who know almost nothing about bullfighting and love the film as a film because it offers you a space for intellectual and moral reflection, it generates a physical impact on the body during the screening and there is an indisputable visual pleasure even in its terrifying nature,” he told La Vanguardia in an interview published last week.

“What I wanted was to make a good film and since I had such a controversial and delicate subject, I had to have a bit of respect and honesty and make sure that all the elements that make up the heart of bullfighting were represented in a certain balance in the final images of the film.”

Aïda Gascon, of Animanaturalis, an animal rights group, is leading a move to overturn a 2013 law which made bullfighting part of Spanish heritage and gave it legal protection from bans.

A petition with 715,000 signatures was presented to parliament which means MPs will have to vote on the proposal.

“This will not be easy but we hope that enough small parties are now against bullfighting that we can overturn this legal protection,” she told The i Paper.

Last year, Spain ended a state prize for bullfighting in a move which angered supporters of the controversial spectacle.

The Spanish Ministry of Culture, which has responsibility for bullfighting as it is regarded as an art, stopped awarding the prize in order to reflect Spain’s changing society.

Animal rights movements have been gaining ground in recent years in Spain as the number of bullfights has fallen.

In 2007, there were 3,651 corridas de toros (bullfights) but this fell to 1,546 by 2022, according to government statistics.