Solo pienso en ti

Spain, 60s years. In the hardest and darkest age of the General Franco's dictatorship, one of its most disturbing and embarrassing chapters was the way the Regime dealt with the mentally handicapped and the treat it gave them. In an era of a strong religiosity and a stronger social repression, all the people with mental retardation (considered by their parents as sin to God's eyes and as useless for the Franquism) were confined in infra-human conditions, sometimes tied to the bed or tree, or they were secluded for life in mental institutions, where were tortured and abused in the most outrageous and perverse way. But in the town of Cabra, a village of Córboda (Andalusia), Juan Pérez Marín, founder of the mental institution Promis, defies that way of thinking giving them work in the own institution and a salary to prove their utility in society. Meanwhile, the Asturias-born singer Víctor Manuel starts his carrier with a series of protest songs which led to him to struggle to the censorship. After an incident in 1972 where he was falsely blamed to step the Spanish flag in a stage play he was doing in Mexico, the Spanish press organized a defamation campaign against it to destroy his music carrier, forcing a six-months exile in the country with his wife, actress an singer Ana Belén. With his carrier blocked by the regime and dedicated to be husband and father, in 1978 Víctor Manuel reads in a newspaper about a love story between Mariluz Castro and Antonio Roldán, two mentally handicapped who live in Promis, and their effort to marry despite the opposition of the priest (because it was assumed that handicapped couldn't fall in love). Using their love story as main inspiration to compose "Solo Pienso en Ti", it not only relaunched his carrier and turned in his signature song, but caused a social movement all along Spain for the rights of the handicapped and their fight to be accepted by the new society raised after the end of Franquism and the arrival of democracy. A story that changed not only the mentality of a country, but served to give dignity to the long time rejected.