Heroic Spain

Toma de Belchite y Teruel

The military uprising of 1936 tried to eradicate all traces of the social transformation that had brought the Republic. There were villages like Guímara, in the Valley of Fornela (León), whose almost unanimous support to the Republic supposed a hard and systematic repression. This isolated village, of about 85 neighbors, suffered one of the most painful forms of punishment: deportation of adults to concentration camps, separating them from their minor children. In this documentary it is told the chronicle of this terrible repression that sought to subdue and subjugate the population through fear, trying to destroy family ties, solidarity networks between the people and personal and collective subsistence economy. The memory of lullabies from their mothers was the echo that reached their children from the forced exile who lived their elders.

Who made the dams of the Ebro, Entrepeñas, Barrios de Luna and many others? Who rebuilt towns and cities like Belchite, Brunete, Oviedo, Teruel... among many other populations? Who built from airports such as Sondica or Labacolla to municipal stadiums like those of Valladolid and Palencia, to prisions like Carabanchel or Cordoba? Republicans who were prisoners condemned to work as slaves, whose only "crime" had been to defend the democratically elected legality. This documentary tries to recover the memory of these events focusing on the battalion of Republican prisoners of Fabero del Bierzo. It investigates the mechanisms of social construction of silence, fear and forgetfulness that even today can be felt where the events occurred and where the descendants of many of those prisoners still live.

A guy invites us to join him in his investigation about what happened in his town, Moaña, during the Spanish Civil War. In an imaginary journey in time, he moves to the town as it should be in July 18 of 1936.

The film, which shows the Battle of the Ebro and the last days of the Spanish Civil War, is an unpublished story by Patricio Azcárate (London, 1920- Alicante, 2018), son of the ambassador of the Second Republic in London, Pablo de Azcárate. Patricio Azcárate participated as a volunteer in the Ebro where, due to his knowledge of languages, he was assigned to the General Staff and served as a translator with the brigade members.

Documentary about the battle of Guadalajara which took place in March 1937 during the Spanish Civil War and was the last major victory of the Republican Army.

Documentary about the last days, death and subsequent search for the remains of Federico García Lorca.

Documentary filmed between September 2012 and March 2013. It tells the story of a valley in the mountains that extends through the north of the provinces of Cádiz and Málaga, the last Republican bastion in the area when Franco's troops already occupied all of them. the nearby regions. La Sauceda was bombed and the town destroyed forever by the air force and four columns of Franco's army. The survivors were locked up in the Marrufo farmhouse, in the municipality of Jerez de la Frontera, where five or six people were shot every day. With the testimonies of the interviewees, everything that happened in those months from the summer of 1936 to the winter of 1937 is reconstructed and the work carried out by the Forum and the Association since 2011 to locate the mass graves is also narrated, in which in the summer of In 2012, the bodies of 28 people were exhumed.

The Asturian Valentín Vega is considered one of the most relevant photographers of the last century. He knew how to portray all the essential elements of daily life like no one else and at the same time exercise a devastating display of social criticism. After spending three years in prison for his political affiliation and managing to establish himself as a street photographer, he would continue to offer an unusual image of reality and daily life from the 1940s onwards.

September 1936. The last republican towns located next to Portugal are conquered by General Franco's troops. As in Badajoz and other towns, the repression they unleash is brutal. The support of the Portuguese dictator Salazar for the coup plotters does not make it advisable to flee to Portugal, but for many it is the only way out. In this way, hundreds of people decide to cross the border, closely pursued by the rebels. The usual procedure of the Portuguese authorities is to hand them over to their Francoist allies. However, thanks to the humanitarian intervention of the Portuguese lieutenant António Augusto de Seixas, two refugee camps were created next to the town of Barrancos to house and protect this group of Spaniards.

Truncated Utopia tells the story of Luisa Rendón Martell, a republican activist who was retaliated against in the province of Cádiz during the civil war and Franco's regime.

Documentary about the anarchist general Antonio Ortiz.

Narration of one of the most lacerating events in the history of this municipality in the Sierra de Cádiz: the murder of 15 neighbors, without trial or formation of any cause. Some of these victims had fled in September 1936 but ended up returning to the municipality, probably in February 1937. It was on that date that the town's Falangists arrested them and executed them, and not as previously thought in the summer of 1936. Several survivors and relatives of those massacres narrate what the arrests of the women and the shootings were like. They also talk about the exhumation of the bodies of these 15 women, where for many years family and friends have brought flowers.

Félix Costa, an anarchist militant who has lived in exile since the end of the Civil War, discovers that the Administration has left him for dead and decides to return to Spain. As he tours the place where they say he was shot dead, he reflects on the validity of his struggle and the fact that he has fallen into oblivion.

Goazen gudari danok is a documentary that recounts the battle of San Miguel and its importance for the creation of the Basque Government.

Documentary about the participation of the International Brigades in February 1937 in containing the advance of the rebel troops after the fall of Malaga.

¿Por qué morir en Madrid?

A video about Neo-Nazis originating in Sweden provides the starting point of an investigation of extremists' networks in Europe, Russia, and North America. Their propaganda is a message of hatred, war, and segregation.

What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)

The history of Bruguera, the most important comic publisher in Spain between the 1940s and the 1980s. How the characters created by great writers and pencilers became Spanish archetypes and how their strips persist nowadays as a portrait of Spain and its people. The daily life of the creators and the founding family, the Brugueras. The world in which hundreds of vivid colorful paper beings lived and still live, in the memory of millions, in the smile of everyone.