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Did you know your surname when you were five years old? The more you think about it, the harder the question becomes to answer. Most of us will have been lucky enough for it not to matter – parents or guardians were always on hand to look after those details. But for Ramón, Elvira and Ricard, it was a very real issue. Their family name was a mystery. Over its four episodes, this gripping documentary series both shows and tells what that absence really means.
The three siblings were found by a station guard as they wandered around Barcelona’s Estació de França in 1984. They carried no luggage or ID. The oldest of them ( Ramón) was five. They had been driven there by a man they knew only as Denis. He had left, ostensibly to buy them sweets, and never returned. No adults came forward to claim them so they found themselves in the Spanish childcare system.
At this point, the mystery deepened. As one carer recalls, the kids who came into her orbit were usually visibly neglected, underfed or otherwise deprived. This trio were the opposite: healthy, well-dressed and articulate for their age. They were also, however, a closed book in terms of concrete information. This was more suspicious still. As Ramón later suggests: “I suspect our parents indoctrinated us, so we wouldn’t share information”.
When the children met foster parents Lluís and Marisa, they finally got lucky. Not only were they able to stay together, but they were soon legally adopted and enjoyed happy, loving childhoods. But questions about their background lingered and when Elvira was in the process of starting a family of her own, she did a DNA test and decided to start exploring the results.
The series feels a little helter-skelter at times; a flurry of emotion and confusion and startling new information and leads and blind alleys, all jostling for space. This chaos is possibly a directorial choice – after all, events don’t unfold in a linear fashion but instead tumble out in a flood of patchy but potent memories. As the oldest child, Ramón was the key to the process. He trawled his subconscious and shapes from his past began to form. A toy store with a crocodile in the window. A park with a fountain. A bad-tempered elderly woman, dressed in black. A large glass of warm milk. This stuff makes the story feel strangely universal: we all have these kinds of associations – vague, bordering on random, yet oddly specific and meaningful to us. However, Ramón also remembers picking up a gun, firing it and seeing sparks dance on the stone steps where the bullet hit. This is somewhat less universal. But, as had already been hinted, there had to be a reason why these children found themselves alone at a railway station.
Were their parents involved in organised crime? As it turns out, it’s not quite that simple. Elvira assembles a team of volunteer investigators and genealogists, and around this time the momentum of the narrative threatens to sag under a persistent flurry of public records, emails and WhatsApp messages. It never quite does, partly because the story at its heart is so singular, involving several European countries, a robbery at a post office, a stolen identity and a gang calling themselves the Gold Bandits of Andalucía. But mainly because of the warmth provided by the bond between the siblings and the drip feed of revelations that start to make sense of their lives. Soon, via grainy but charming photographs, we’re meeting the parents: Ramón Sr and Rosario, a real life Bonnie and Clyde, but in over their heads and seemingly paying a heavy price.
At times, Abandoned plays out like a true crime series. There’s a certain open-endedness to it: as was the case with series such as Making a Murderer, it’s easy to imagine meeting this family again, new facts having emerged as a result of the existence of the show. While the many journalists who have got involved (including the Guardian’s Giles Tremlett, who was part of the investigations) generally suspect Ramón Sr and Rosario are dead, the case isn’t officially closed.
And in any case, the indomitable Elvira clearly has no intention of stopping. Eventually, what the series makes evocatively clear is that the search itself is the point. Attaching places to photographs and dates to half-forgotten memories is itself a reflective and revelatory process. The three siblings lost something profound in 1984 and they’re now engaged in a process of constant retrieval. Seeing them goofing around while recreating childhood photos in a playground lays their motivations clear. They’re making memories they can actually remember. They’re building identities. “I wanted to know if they loved me,” says Elvira. Maybe the trio will never learn everything about their parents and their exact motivations for leaving them, without a name at a railway station. But they aren’t going to stop trying.
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