Franco's cruel legacy: the film that wants to stop Spain forgetting. By Sam Jones
At the heart of the
film is the contradiction summed up by one of the lawyers in the case, the
late human
rights specialist Carlos Slepoy: “When someone is murdered it is clear: the
courts must prosecute the criminal. “Yet when we talk
about genocide, or crimes against humanity, it’s not so clear. Instead, people
start looking for arguments – ‘it was a long time ago’, ‘it’s better to
forget’, ‘we must turn the page’.”
The Silence of Others, backed by Pedro
Almodóvar, seeks to end amnesia over dictator’s victims
Chato Galante returns
to the jail cell where he was imprisoned as a 24-year-old for opposing the
Franco dictatorship. Photograph: Almudena Carracedo 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.
María Martín sits by the road which covers the mass grave containing her
mother’s remains. Photograph: Almudena Carracedo
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... read more:
