Locations
During the shooting, the weather showed all its seasons, with temperatures as high as 42 degrees by the end of the summer which hit a low of 2 degrees below zero by the end of November.
The shooting started in September 2013 and lasted eight weeks and one day shared among Isla Mayor, Isla Menor and the capital of Seville.
The movie featured around 400 extras, many of whom lived in the area.
There are several complicated scenes under the rain, which in no case was real rain. The crew waited until it stopped raining to add its rain – this is how they work in the film industry.
Crabs invade the roads in the morning, something very curious to see and which the crew encountered each day when they headed to work.
1980. In a tiny town in the marshes of the Guadalquivir river, two teenagers disappear during its festivities. Nobody misses them, all the young people want to live away and some of them run away from home to achieve this. Rocío, the girls’ mother, gets the regional judge interested in them. From Madrid, the Police send two homicide detectives, with very different profiles and methods, who, for different reasons, are not going through their best moment at the police force.
“La Isla Mínima started several years ago, in a photographic exhibition I attended with Alex Catalán, a cinematographer and good friend. The Sevillian photographer Atín Aya had devoted to capture the last vestiges of a way of life that developed in the Guadalquivir marshes for half a century. Many of the pictures were portraits of locals, and they transmitted some kind of resignation, distrust and harshness, pervading those faces stuck in the past, which, with the mechanisation of the agriculture, might not find their place in an immediate future. The exhibition was the reflection of the end of a period, the end of an era. This was my first contact with ‘La Isla’ (The Island) – a crepuscular landscape, the setting of an end-of-cycle western.”
