“How sad it is to die without having seen all the landscapes, without having read all the books!” Juan Ramón Jiménez once wrote. One of the landscapes he did get to see and live in was Coral Gables, in South Florida, towards the end of his life. The documentary Espacio: Juan Ramón Jiménez en Miami (2025), directed by Carlos García Pandiello, explores the Moguer poet’s mark on these places that today seem so detached from the imagination of a poet, and has begun its journey through festivals and exhibition venues. Its director, who is a writer and screenwriter, agreed to answer some questions about the documentary and other topics.
1- How did the idea for the documentary come about?
The idea came about during a seminar on Peninsular Poetry that I took at FIU. I was pursuing a PhD in Hispanic American Literature and had just started writing for television. The truth is that I was feeling a little jaded by academic writing, and instead of writing another research paper, I proposed to my professor that we produce a short documentary on the most important aspects of Juan Ramón Jiménez’s stay in Miami, which lasted from 1939 to 1942. But as soon as I started researching, I realized that nothing related to Juan Ramón can be treated lightly. That’s when I decided to make a documentary worthy of the poet, with the rigor he deserves, although production had to be postponed for a few years. And well, I ended up writing a research paper that was not just another assignment, as it was dedicated to analyzing Espacio, Tiempo, and Romances de Coral Gables, the three great works that Juan Ramón wrote in Miami.
2- What were the main archival sources you used?
One of the challenges of producing a historical documentary is filling in the visual gaps related to past moments or eras. Fortunately, there are film archives such as the Prelinger Archives and Internet Archives where filmmakers can find everything from old World War II reels to the popular 8mm and 16mm films that became increasingly popular in the United States in the 1930s. I think that without these archives, the result of my documentary would have been very different, especially since most of the material found in them is classified as “public domain.” As for the material related to Juan Ramón and his wife Zenobia Camprubí, I think that few writers of the time were as photographed as they were. Much of this material has been printed in two beautiful publications by the Residencia de Estudiantes, Juan Ramón Jiménez. Álbum and Juan Ramón Jiménez. Premio Nobel 1956. Most of the photographs shown in my documentary come from those books.
3- What are your prospects for its distribution and reaching a wider audience?
The documentary will soon begin its journey through various festivals, mainly in the United States and Spain, and I hope that it will be shown on some public television stations. I also plan to show it at universities and other study centers. In the fall, I will travel to Moguer, the poet’s hometown, where the film will be shown at the Zenobia-Juan Ramón Jiménez Foundation. It’s something I’m really excited about.
4- In terms of the concept of the film, how did the idea of a voiceover narrating and guiding the viewer come about?
I thought a lot about using voice-over during the pre-production stage of the documentary, as it is used less and less in non-fiction film and is often seen as an outdated practice. However, many directors continue to use it, especially when the protagonist of the film is someone who has already passed away. I think that if I hadn’t used voice-over, many things would have been left unsaid. In American and Anglo-Saxon cinema, it is a technique that continues to be used to great effect. The secret, I think, is to use an actor rather than a professional voiceover artist. In my case, that person was Xavier Coronel, a formidable Ecuadorian actor who was able to internalize and express the world and work of Juan Ramón Jiménez in an extraordinary way.
5- For those who haven’t seen the documentary yet, how would you summarize Juan Ramón’s relationship with the Miami he found? Did he owe anything to Miami? Did it leave any mark on him as a poet and as a person?
Juan Ramón was dazzled by what he found in Miami. He came from the bustling Havana of the 1930s and immediately felt at ease with the tranquility of South Florida, a “green silence” that reminded him of Andalusia, of Moguer, his hometown. The white houses, the Everglades (Moguer is also surrounded by swamps), the pine trees, and the Spanish names of the houses in Coral Gables made him feel completely at one with his surroundings. Perhaps that is why Coral Gables was the place where he returned to writing poetry after leaving Spain in 1936. Suffice it to say that Espacio, a long prose poem inspired by the “immensely immense” Florida plains, is considered by many critics to be the most important poem of his vast oeuvre. Someone as authoritative as Octavio Paz claimed that it was “a monument to the poetic consciousness of the 20th century.” The fact that the most influential Spanish poet of the 20th century was inspired by Miami’s geography to write his most distinguished lyrical composition gives you a measure of the mark this city and its surroundings left on him.
6- Why, despite Miami being a meeting point for several generations of writers for more than a century, does the idea of a literarily poor city persist?
I think it’s due to a stereotypical view of Miami: a paradise under the sun where people are always partying, shopping, or at the beach. For many people, it must be difficult to associate this city with literature. In fact, I’ve been working on a parodic essay for some time now, which I’ve titled “Theory of Beach Literature.” Can you imagine finding a book in a bookstore titled “Anthology of Honolulu Poetry,” or another that refers to “the narrative of Cancun” or “the theater of Bávaro”? I think something like that happens with Miami. Of course, it doesn’t help that most of the writers who live in this city, due to political prejudices and ideological biases, are not taken into account by the publishing and academic world.
7- Do you feel that Juan Ramon’s work is read and still appreciated today, or has it suffered the same fate as so many great poets of the last century, who are either forgotten or mentioned more often than they are read?
Until very recently, the perception of Juan Ramón’s work and figure was lamentable, especially in his homeland, where he was one of only six writers to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Andrés Trapiello has said that in Spain “they went for Juan Ramón’s throat.” Carmen Hernández Pinzón, the poet’s grandniece, has commented that for years he was banned from Spanish universities. This aversion seems to have its origins in the disagreements that existed between Juan Ramón and the Generation of ’27, of which he was the mentor. Many of the members of that group, and their disciples, ended up teaching and sowing the seeds of animosity towards the poet from Moguer.
Hernández Pinzón says that for decades there was almost no editorial interest in his work, which leads me to believe that even in this sense Juan Ramón was also a very Miami writer. Fortunately, this has begun to change in recent years thanks to the work of critics and biographers such as Trapiello, Javier Blasco, José Antonio Expósito, and Alfonso Alegre Heitzmann. In Miami, Habey Hechavarría, a Cuban academic, recently dedicated his doctoral dissertation to studying Juan Ramón’s poetry from his American period. I hope my documentary will help spread the word about the importance that the author of Espacio had and continues to have for South Florida: a literary giant who put Miami on the map of 20th-century Spanish-language literature.
Cover image: Still from Espacio: Juan Ramón Jiménez en Miami (courtesy of Carlos García Pandiello).
