Unbändiges Spanien

La Antorcha de los Éxitos: Cifesa (1932-1961)

October 2022 •Spanish

The amazing story of Cifesa, a mythical film production company founded in Valencia by the Casanova family that managed to dominate the box office during the turbulent times of the Second Spanish Republic, the carnage of the Civil War and the hardships of the long post-war period and Franco's dictatorship — and survive until the sixties, when Spain was timidly beginning to change.

Return to Life

December 1937 •French

In this propaganda film intended to raise money for republicans fighting in the Spanish Civil War, Henri Cartier-Bresson first presents the achievements of the Spanish Republic in the field of public health. He then shows how members of the public and organizations across the world were supporting the fighters.

Extranjeros de sí mismos

October 2000 •Spanish

La doble vida del faquir

September 2005 •Spanish

La doble vida del faquir (The magicians) returns to the scene of a school in the Catalan town of Sant Julià de Vilatorta where, in 1937, in the midst of civil war, a film-maker in hiding and a group of orphaned children dressed up as sultans and explorers shot an exotic adventure film. The films protagonists relive those childhood days when they were able to switch their school smocks for oriental turbans, while reality imposed its own fancy dress ball with military uniforms and priests dressed in civilian garb.

Franco on Trial: The Spanish Nuremberg?

February 2018 •English

Franco on Trial is the new film by Dietmar Post and Lucía Palacios. After the success of Franco's Settlers, their first encounter with Franco's dictatorship, they are now setting their sights on one of the darkest chapters of European history: the presumed organized extermination that took place during the coup, the war, and the subsequent dictatorship led by Franco, as well as Argentina's current effort, by invoking the principle of universal jurisdiction, to prosecute Francoists accused of committing crimes against humanity. The film is also a sore reminder of an issue that still stands today: the clear-cut accountability held by Germany, Italy, and Portugal. The film accomplishes to give both sides a voice - those against whom the killing has been directed; and the side of the perpetrators.

Barcellona, ferita aperta

July 2016 •Italian

Ordered personally by Mussolini, with the expression "martellamento diluito nel tempo", the bombings were a studied way of sowing terror, massacring citizens little by little and ending their sources of livelihood. The film provides little-known data from that episode, such as official documents that show that democratic Italy continued to receive money from Spain for its participation in the war. In 2013, the Barcelona Court accepted a complaint against the Italian pilots who participated in the bombings. The victims, for their part, are still waiting for Italy to apologize for these events.

Brigades Internationales. Entre mémoire et silence

January 2016 •English

This documentary summarizes one of the most beautiful pages of contemporary history. Thousands of women and men, some "foreigners" wrote them: the page of anti-fascist solidarity with the Spanish Republic and its victorious Popular Front in February 1936 for some, and solidarity with the "revolution" for others; both causes for most of them.

El final de la ofensiva

September 2020 •Spanish

Gijón was one of the most bombed cities on the northern front during the Spanish civil war. This documentary confronts, on the one hand, the images of a propaganda video made by the rebel side in 1937, with the images of abundant graphic material of the time, which show a very different reality of the city.

Spain: A Country Divided

June 2022 •Spanish

Obsessively referring to the traumas and wounds that the Spanish civil war (1936-39) and Franco's dictatorship (1939-75) caused in their day no longer serves to explain the impassable abyss of incomprehension and hatred that the abject policies and radical positions adopted by both the right and the left in recent decades have opened up before the citizens of a country that is barely known beyond hackneyed cultural clichés.

¡Arriba España!

January 1976 •Spanish

Documentary about the Spanish Civil War and its subsequent consequences on the country's society, featuring testimonies from various figures, interviews, and significant photographic and audio documents.

Francisco Boix: A Photographer in Hell

January 2000 •Spanish

In 1939, just finished the Spanish Civil War, Spanish republican photographer Francesc Boix escapes from Spain; but is captured by the Nazis in 1940 and imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp, in Austria, a year later. There, he works as a prisoner in the SS Photographic Service, hiding, between 1943 and 1945, around 20,000 negatives that later will be presented as evidence during several trials conducted against Nazi war criminals after World War II.

Estos muros

October 2021 •Spanish

In the mountains of Madrid, Spain, a railway track on an abandoned bridge and a poem erased from the wall of a ruined building reveal a deliberately silenced story: the system established by Franco's dictatorship after the civil war (1936-39) that allowed hundreds of companies to use thousands of convicted Republicans as slave labor.

The Man Who Was There

May 2013 •Spanish

The Spanish journalist Manuel Chaves Nogales (1897-1944) was always there where the news broke out: in the fratricidal Spain of 1936, in Bolshevik Russia, in Fascist Italy, in Nazi Germany, in occupied Paris or in the bombed London of World War II; because his job was to walk, see and tell stories, and thus fight against tyrants, at a time when it was necessary to take sides in order not to be left alone; but he, a man of integrity to the bitter end, never did so.

Agustina González. La zapatera que miraba a las estrellas

August 2023 •Spanish

The Moroccan Labyrinth

November 2007 •Spanish

Why Did We Lose the War?

April 1978 •Spanish

A documentary about how Republican forces lost to Franco in the Spanish Civil War.

Broken Memories

December 2010 •Spanish

An audiovisual chronicle of the Spanish Civil War in Galicia. Memorias Rotas centers on a group of republican fighters leaded by Commander José Moreno. The group disappears as they fail trying to escape by sea in the border between Galicia and Asturias and nobody ever knows about them.

Fallas 37: el arte en guerra

March 2013 •Spanish

In November 1936, a few months since the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, the government of the Second Republic moves to Valencia. In this situation, several Valencian artists and intellectuals decide to build four fallas — satirical plasterboard sculptures created to be burnt — to mock fascism.

Siempre días azules

November 2005 •Spanish

Rocío

July 1980 •Spanish

The film shows the genesis of the El Rocío pilgrimage and unveils the economic, socio-political and religious reasons and interests that nurture the phenomenon.