José Luis Guerín once again walks the path he opened a quarter of a century ago with In Construction (2001), the film that established him at the San Sebastián Film Festival with the Jury’s Grand Prize. Now, at the same festival and competing for the Golden Shell, he presents Good Valley Stories, a project he shares with Jonás Trueba as producer, and which reaffirms, once again, that Guerín’s cinema is built on listening, observation, and a poetic gaze at everyday life.

The setting is Vallbona, a peripheral neighborhood of Barcelona, far removed from the usual image of the city. In In Construction, the story was rooted in El Raval, amid its urban transformation; now Guerín turns to this small territory, turned into an island encircled by highways and railway lines. There, in the midst of the roar of engines and the rumble of trains, lives a community that has forged a singular character. They are the descendants of those who came from other parts of Spain during the twentieth century and, later, of those who arrived from even more distant lands.

The director portrays neighbors who seem drawn from an ancient oral tradition. They are not professional actors, but men, women, and children who convey profound knowledge, a distinctive humor, and a proud sense of belonging. We hear them reflect on nature, climate change, political history, or real estate speculation with a disarming naturalness. These conversations, at times seemingly improvised, end up revealing what is most essential: humanity itself. Guerín captures that intangible spark in which the everyday becomes collective memory.

The film also lingers on gestures that verge on the symbolic, such as the procession of neighbors carrying almond trees uprooted from their land to be transplanted elsewhere. This act, imbued with beauty, reflects how the rural yields to the urban, how the old is displaced to make room for the new. Yet at the same time, the gesture becomes both resistance and homage: a life that refuses to vanish completely.

There is a particularly revealing moment when a neighbor dreams of shooting a western in Vallbona. Guerín, in complicity, grants him a scene that evokes Ford, as if the good valley could transform into a mythical stage of cinema. It is in this blend of reality and dream where the film finds its greatest strength. Good Valley Stories does not provide answers, but rather fragments which, together, compose a choral portrait of a neighborhood and, by extension, of a country and a time.

The director shows that his cinema remains a “work in progress,” as the opening sign indicates, for he does not seek closed conclusions. What matters is accompanying those who inhabit these shadowed spaces and making visible what so often remains unseen. That is why the film feels like a celebration of collectivity, an act of love toward those who endure in the midst of the whirlwind of urban transformations.