Spanish A.B.C.

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.

The Colegio de Arquitectos de Catalunya commissioned Pere Portabella to make this film for the Joan Miró retrospective exhibit in 1969. There were heated discussions on whether it would be prudent to screen the film during the exhibit. Portabella took the following stance: "either both films are screened or they don't screen any" and, finally, both Miro l'Altre and Aidez l'Espagne were shown. The film was made by combining newsreels and film material from the Spanish Civil War with prints by Miró from the series "Barcelona" (1939-1944). The film ends with the painter's "pochoir" known as Aidez l'Espagne.

Caudillo is a documentary film by Spanish film director Basilio Martín Patino. It follows the military and political career of Francisco Franco and the most important moments of the Spanish Civil War. It uses footage from both sides of the war, music from the period and voice-over testimonies of various people.

Brigadistas

Dix Jours dans la guerre d'Espagne

Presas de Franco

A retrospective look at the anarcho-syndicalist and anarcho-communist experience in Spain from 1930 until the end of the Civil War in 1939.

Juan Méndez Bernal leaves his house on the 9th of april of 1936 to fight in the imminent Spanish Civil War. 83 years later, his body is still one of the Grass Dwellers. The only thing that he leaves from those years on the front is a collection of 28 letters in his own writing.

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.

Cuba, 1961: 250,000 volunteers taught 700,000 people to read and write in one year. 100,000 of the teachers were under 18 years old. Over half were women. MAESTRA explores this story through the personal testimonies of the young women who went out to teach literacy in rural communities across the island - and found themselves deeply transformed in the process.

A particular reading of the forties and fifties in Spain, the hard years of famine and repression after the massacre of the Civil War, through popular culture: songs, newspapers and magazines, movies and newsreels.

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.

Documentary about the evacuation in different countries, during the Spanish civil war, of thousands of Spanish children to remove them from the conflict. Approximately three thousand children were welcomed by the Soviet Union. Some of these children, now elderly people, tell us about their experiences during this trip that originally was to be a temporary evacuation and which many could not return until twenty years later.

Exilio. El exilio republicano español (1939-1978)

Third film of Juan José Ponce's trilogy about Federico García Lorca.

The story of the pioneering electronic composer Ramón Sender Barayón. From his escape from the Spanish Civil War to the California of psychedelia, hippies and counterculture.

1939. Thousands of refugees were concentrated in the last republican sectors of Catalonia to cross into France. Through the Camprodon Valley, in the Pyrenean region of Ripollés, some 100,000 people crossed to the neighboring country: civilians, military, international brigades, including doctors and wounded. The war in Spain was ending, but soon another would begin. 100,000 people left their homes behind. Many would return, others would continue the fight.

During the Spanish Civil War, more than 500 young Spanish pilots went through the Russian Aviation School in Kirovabad, former capital of the current Republic of Azerbaijan. Once the Spanish war was over, some of them remained in Soviet territory and continued their fight against Fascism on the side of the Russian army.

A true story: some years ago, I paid one euro for a handbag in an informal auction in Valencia. When I came home, I found inside the handbag lots of papers. Amongst them, two letters dated 1946, unsent. Their author announced his imminent suicide, due to the negative effects of war, prison and the lost of his family. El ultimo abrazo (The last embrace) is a short documentary film about our research, from the moment we found the letters until we find out who had written these letters, what had driven him to take his own life and why were both letters together and unsent.

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.