Blast from Denia's past for 80s-themed film

DENIA’S Baix la Mar district temporarily returned to the 1980s for the film, El Sustituto.
Directed by Oscar Aibar and starring Ricardo Gomez, the thriller centres on Nazis who fled from the Allies at the end of the Second World War.
It is no secret that many found shelter in Spain during the early dictatorship of Francisco Franco, some of them living comfortably on the Costa Blanca and, more particularly, in the Marina Alta.
The plot of El Sustito centres on a police officer from a tough Madrid area, played by Ricardo Gomez, who accepts a transfer to Denia.
He had hoped for a quiet life and an improvement in his daughter’s health but the investigation into his predecessor’s murder leads him to a group of elderly Nazis who are ending their days in idyllic surroundings on the Costa Blanca.
“Some years ago, I noticed a photo on the wall of a restaurant on the coast,” Aibar told an Alicante Plaza interviewer as he explained the background to his latest film.
“It showed some men dressed in Nazi uniforms from the Second World War, sitting happily round a table,” Aibar said.
“The image had been taken in the same place, no more than 20 years previously.”
Aibar went on to explain that his own enquiries revealed “hundreds” of details about Nazis living peacefully on the Costa Blanca well into the years of the post-Franco Transition.
“That is the incredible story behind El Substituto,” Aibar told Alicante Plaza.