Documentary on Franco's Cruel Legacy: 'The Silence of Others,' Spain Must Stop Forgetting
The Guardian, "Franco's Cruel Legacy: The Film That Wants to Stop Spain Forgetting," June 7, 2018. The Silence of Others, backed by Pedro Almodóvar, seeks to end amnesia over dictator's victims.
Chato Galante, who was stripped of his youth in the prison cells and torture rooms of Franco’s Spain, likes to joke that he is an “unrepentant optimist”. He has had to be. Almost half a century has passed since he was beaten and jailed for his efforts to fight the dictatorship, but he remains confident that justice will be done, that his torturers will answer publicly for their crimes and that his convictions will be overturned.
Equally optimistic is Paqui Maqueda. Sooner or later, she says, Spain will find the courage to confront the Franco years and their insidious legacy. Perhaps then she will establish what happened to her elder brother, who is thought to have been one of the thousands of children secretly and systematically stolen from their mothers at birth to be placed with less “degenerate” families.
Galante and Maqueda’s stories feature in an award-winning documentary due to be shown at Sheffield Doc/Fest on Saturday that examines the enduring consequences of the amnesty law and the “pact of forgetting” that facilitated Spain’s return to democracy after Franco’s death in 1975.
The Silence of Others, directed by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar, chronicles the fight for justice as well as the search for the stolen children and the 100,000 bodies still thought to lie in unmarked civil war graves. Pedro and Agustín Almodóvar are the film’s executive producers.
“Part of it was trying to understand how all of this is possible,” says Carracedo. “How is it possible today that there are people who are dying before they’re able to exhume their loved ones and bury them in a cemetery in a country with such Christian values? How is it possible that there are thousands of children who don’t know who their parents are?”
The idea for the film came to Carracedo and Bahar eight years ago as details of Spain’s “stolen babies” began to emerge – including the revelation that the practice had not died with the dictator but continued into the 1980s...More..
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/08/francos-cruel-legacy-film-wants-stop-spain-forgetting-silence-others
-Pedro Sanchez Sworn in As Spain's Prime Minister After No-Confidence Vote, The Guardian, June 2, 2018.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/02/pedro-sanchez-sworn-in-spain-prime-minister-socialist-psoe
-Guernica, Basque Country, The Town That Became A Symbol for Peace, Picasso, The Guardian, April 5, 2017.
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2017/apr/05/guernica-anniversary-basque-country-picasso-painting-peace
'Guernica,' by Pablo Picasso, 1937.
Spanish painter Pablo Picasso’s anti-war painting of the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica is one of the 20th century’s most famous images. A 20-by-30 foot vast canvas in sombre tones of grey and blue, it shows in searing detail the suffering of people and animals as bombs fell on their town.
He painted it for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris and toured it around the world to publicise the massacre. Picasso swore that neither he nor this painting would ever visit Spain until democracy was restored. This did not happen until 1978, five years after his death. The picture was finally returned to Spain in 1981.