With the theme #BreakingTheSilence, FiSahara 2020 had to bring I couldn’t stop bringing The Silence of Others, the film directed by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar who won the Goya 2019 for Best Documentary Film and was shortlisted for the 2019 Oscars. Through stories like María Martín’s (in the top image), this film produced by Pedro Almodóvar reveals the silenced struggle of the victims of Francisco Franco’s regime, who continue to seek justice to this day.
The Silence of Others is the result of a shoot carried out over six years, in which, through stories like Mary’s, it is about the fight against a “pact of forgetting”. On September 21, 1936 the Franco army threw the corpse of María’s mother into a mass grave in Buenaventura (Toledo). His daughter was then six years old and, more than 70 years later, she continues to bring flowers to the kilometer point of the gutter where her mother is. This is one of the more than 2,500 mass graves that span Spain, where there are still more than 100,000 bodies to recover.
The stories that are exposed in this documentary, both of relatives of people shot and tortured during the Franco dictatorship, recover the debate about the clash of the 1977 Amnesty Law and the Universal Justice Law. It is not the only drama that has been silenced for many years included in the documentary: it also shows how tens of thousands of mothers and fathers continue to look for their daughters and sons, who were robbed of them at birth.
Carracedo and Bahar mark an astonishing reversal, for it was Spain that pioneered universal jurisdiction to bring down former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and yet now it is an Argentine judge, María Servini, who must bring Spain’s own past to light.
International recognition
After seven years of work, The Silence of Others premiered at the Berlinale in February 2018, winning the Panorama Section Audience Award and the Peace Film Award. That was the beginning of a long journey, since it has already participated in more than 80 festivals around the world and received more than 35 awards, including the Sheffield Doc/Fest Jury Prize, Social Justice Award at the Hamptons Film Festival , Public Award of Thessaloniki Festival, No. 2 Favorite of the Public in IDFA and Top 10 Favorites of the Public in HotDocs, in addition to being nominated for Best European Film at the European Film Awards.
Now it arrives at FiSahara 2020, which will take place from April 14 to 19 at the Ausserd refugee camp in the Algerian Sahara desert. It is already possible to book a place on the charter flight that we will fly from Madrid, without which it would not be possible to bring all the necessary material to develop this film and Human Rights festival. Save the date!
