The presentation took place on Thursday 8 October in the Sala Manuel de Falla in the SGAE headquarters in Madrid, along with Rosa María Mateo the journalist, Eduardo Ladrón de Guevara the scriptwriter and creator of the series and Maria Luisa Ortega from the Autonomous University of Madrid.

Pousa was a scriptwriter for the  'Cuéntame cómo pasó' series for nine seasons and this book is the result of detailed research into the relationships that fiction creates through cinematographic and television-related content as well as different cultural models, in an interesting game switching between the present and the past during each episode.

" I needed to distance myself from my career as a scriptwriter and from my emotional ties to ‘Cuéntame cómo pasó’ in order to understand it and analyse it based on a critical reflection.  It was a difficult job, therapeutic on occasion, and it also revealed constant drama to me" said the author while she was presenting her book.

Pousa's aim was to understand the complex and essential forms which are used in  ‘Cuéntame cómo pasó’ as a historical series, which depicts the last years of Francoism in Spain in an audiovisual format, through characters and narrative situations that are linked to our collective imagination.

As part of this process, the author combed through the vast amount of dramatic material she had, focusing on selecting the documentary and fiction-related elements which provide the backbone to her narrations, those which were transcendental, or provided ideological, historical and cultural strength.  The result is a rigorous project which will undoubtedly help people to understand the value of ‘Cuéntame cómo pasó’ as a successful and popular fiction series since it is a work of academic interest that is enabling the emergence of a new type of television memoir.

About Laura Pousa            

Laura Pousa is a scriptwriter and has a PhD in Cinema History from the Autonomous University of Madrid.  She combines her professional career as a creator of fiction — with more than ten years of experience as a television scriptwriter — with university teaching and research.  She was a professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts in the Complutense University of Madrid (the Aranjuez campus) and she is currently teaching at UIC Barcelona.  In 2012 she was nominated for the 2012 Goya award for the Best Fictional Short Film for Meine Liebe and received The Abbas Kiarostami Film Seminar award as well.  La memoria televisada: 'Cuéntame cómo pasó' (Comunicación Social, 2015) is her first book.