Fuentes de la memoria

Lágrimas rojas

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

Contracampos is the attempt to (re)build a landscape. A recreational area and a shooting range in the west of Asturies, which, between 1937 and 1943, housed a Francoist concentration camp through which thousands of Republicans passed – firstly militiamen, later guerrillas and their relatives. Sharing a leisurely observation with the viewer, the film intends to resignify that space, giving it back its political meaning. But it is not a question of showing –of filming– the invisible, but rather of showing what is missing in what exists today. What was and is no longer, not even in people's memories.

The documentary is about the destruction of the republican educational model. It narrates the cleansing that Spanish teachers underwent during and after the Civil War.

A documentary about the recovery of the historical memory of the Malaga town of Archidona, a journey through the history of Archidona from the Second Republic to the last years of the post-war period. A work that speaks, above all, about people, experiences, emotions and feelings.

Documentary that narrates a key moment in our history: the Franco coup d'état, the cruel repression that was carried out and the attempts at resistance in the Charra province. Many people are convinced that Salamanca surrendered with open arms to the coup plotters; However, nothing could be further from the truth. In Salamanca there was repression and there were attempts at resistance; There were arrests and there were tortures, there were shootings and there were disappearances. In Salamanca there was also harsh repression that manifested itself in all its forms.

At the start of 1939 an exodus of nearly 500,000 Spanish Republicans, soldiers and civilians together, fleeing Franco's troops crossed the border to France. Louis Llech, a Perpignan based shopkeeper and enlightened amateur cineaste, owned a 16mm camera. Together with his friend Isambert, he filmed this extraordinary migration. Fascinated by the military aspect of this Retirada, he favoured shots of parades, of crowds, like those showing military equipment. He nonetheless also showed civilian distress, without insisting on its picturesque aspects, focussing more on images of the uninterrupted flow of refugees.

After the discovery of a suitcase hidden in the family home of Francisco Martínez Gascón, known as Kautela, a photojournalist who lived through the Spanish Civil War from the perspective of the rebel side, his granddaughter decides to carry out an investigation into his life and work.

During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Second World War (1939-1945), around three thousand people managed to elude their pursuers, and probably also avoided being killed, thanks to the heroic and very efficient efforts of the Ponzán Team, a brave group of people — mountain guides, forgers, safe house keepers and many others —, led by Francisco Ponzán Vidal, who managed to save their lives, both on one side and the other of the border between Spain and France.

Brigadistas

During the 30s, the young Catalan teacher Antoni Benaiges takes office at a rural school in northern Spain. Antoni has a simple project: he wants to teach his pupils to write and to be free through the use of the printing press. But his dream ends very soon. An individual and collective story in memory of the victims of the Franco's repression.

Heart of the Generacion 27, Spanish poet Emilio Prados recalls his lifetime from Mexican exile where Spanish Civil War has forced him, as other Spanish intellectuals in 1930s.

Analysis of Robert Capa's professional career and the historical impact of his visual treatment of the Spanish Civil War.

A missing submarine in Spanish Civil War leads to the first German Navy operation before WW2. Republican submarine C-3 was the victim of international secrecy and intrigues, after a torpedo from U-34 sunk it on December 12th 1936.

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.

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.

La Historia Enterrada

The memory of the poet Vicente Aleixandre remains silent at No. 3 Velintonia Street. Home of a Nobel Prize in Literature 1977, it also recalls the joy of Lorca and other members of Generation´27, the pain of civil war and post-war, and became a meeting point for most writers in 20th century Spanish Literature, now is abandoned and for sale. This documentary recreates its story and spirit.

Cautivos en la arena

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.