Spanish A.B.C.

The Moroccan Labyrinth

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.

¿Por qué morir en Madrid?

A retired high school English teacher is confronted by a former student who failed her class 15 years prior. He then involves her in a feature-length presentation on Moby-Dick and the science of reading.

Cautivos en la arena

While cleaning the apartment of Lucía, her deceased grandmother, Anna finds a notebook where she discovers the story of a secretly kept love, lived during the turbulent years of the Second Republic and the Spanish Civil War.

Too often, if a child is illiterate at the end of third grade, they will fall behind forever. By nine years old, many children are already SENTENCED to the cycles of poverty, prison, and addiction that have devastated generations before them. Our story begins with a heartbreaking look at adults who never learned to read and ends with the children who still have a chance.

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

Extranjeros de sí mismos

Más allá de la alambrada: la memoria del horror

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.

Lágrimas rojas

The raw, heartfelt and often funny journey of adult Aboriginal students and their teachers as they discover the transformative power of reading and writing for the first time.

Documentary produced by Falange and edited in Berlin, in response to the international success of the Republican production "Spain 1936" (Le Chanois, 1937).

The young farmer Aalami leaves his family to find work elsewhere. He gets to know the country and its people, customs and traditions at Küste in North Africa: Market life in Tetuan, the art of craftsmanship, the life of the Moors, dances and festivities in honour of the caliph, white mosques, the call of the muezzin of the minaret and the music of the shepherd flutes. Aalami also follows Franco's call and flies from Morocco to Spain to fight at Bürgerkrieg. In the end Aalami comes back to his wife and children.

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.

A feature-length documentary based on film reports from the Spanish civil war.

La Historia Enterrada

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.

The Truth About Reading looks at the illiteracy problem in America, highlighting people who learned to read as adults, and sharing proposed solutions for working towards a future where every child learns to read proficiently.