Interview Nuria Ibáñez, director of “El guardian”

At the last Malaga Festival, we were able to see The Guardianthe debut fiction feature by Nuria Ibáñez Castañeda, co-production between Spain and Mexico. The film takes us to an almost deserted beach in Baja California, on the Pacific coast, where Basilio lives, played by Basilio Moncada: a man deported from the United States who works as a caretaker of a natural paradise. At first glance, their life seems simple: take care of the beach, observe the horizon and resist the passage of time. But what begins as a minimal story soon turns into a moral conflict. The Guardian It is a disturbing film because Basilio lives surrounded by illegal activities, economic pressures and a reality in which corruption is part of the landscape, and yet he decides to remain firm in his principles. We spoke with its director and screenwriter Nuria Ibáñez Castañeda.

Nuria, you come from the documentary, with titles like The tightropewinner of the Ariel, or The naked room. What has it been like to make the leap into fiction with a story like this?

The good thing is that I made that transition hand in hand with the documentary, because in The Guardian I recover the same place and the same character that I filmed in A wild streammy latest documentary. So, on the one hand, Basilio makes his debut as an actor and I also make my debut as a fiction director, and I think that made the process especially beautiful. It helped us both a lot to debut together. In some way, that experience confirmed to me that documentary and fiction are not as far apart as they sometimes seem; There is a very fine line between the two, and I have been able to cross it from a freer and wilder current. Deep down, something was left unresolved in that previous work, and fiction has given me the opportunity to return to the same space to tell things in a different way.

You are from Madrid, but you have studied and lived for many years in Mexico, where you also trained in screenwriting. What has that perspective of someone who comes from outside given you when developing a story like this, set in a place as unique as Baja California and that almost deserted beach?

I think that being a foreigner in a place always provides a different point of view. I find it very interesting because, in the end, you see things that perhaps those who live there every day no longer see. I am very interested not only in what I contribute, but also in what happens when someone arrives and sets their sights on other places, on other realities. In Mexico that has happened to me a lot. In fact, I have approached very emblematic, difficult or even taboo spaces to portray them from that different perspective, from the fact of not fully belonging. And that allows you to say: “this is here, this exists, this deserves to be looked at.” It happened to me, for example, with a children's psychiatric hospital in Mexico City, a place that had never been portrayed on film. For me, that value of observation, distance and strangeness is very powerful when you make a documentary in a country that is not yours.

The Guardian It has been very moving for the Mexican public because it has connected a lot with Basilio.

Nuria Ibáñez Castañeda, director and screenwriter of The Guardian

Reading some reviews of the film, many Mexican viewers who had already seen it at the Morelia Festival pointed out that the film captured very well that double standard that exists in Mexico: submit to the pressures of the environment, deceive or not to deceive, maintain your principles or not. And I think it's very nice that many of them have seen themselves recognized in that conflict.

Yes, I think the film has been very moving because people have connected a lot with Basilio, who is a character who, paradoxically, at first you don't fully understand. Apparently, he works for an employer who does not pay him, and that makes the story have a very interesting ambiguity. It is a slow, reflective cinema that does not look for easy answers. And that's precisely why I'm excited that it has reached the public like this: because it raises an uncomfortable and very human question, which is what it means to stay honest when everything around you is pushing you in just the opposite direction.

The Guardian (Nuria Ibáñez Castañeda, 2025)