He would like to pause for a moment, to awaken the dead and put the past back together. This sentence that the German philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote in Thesis IX in his Essay On the Concept of History, will be used as the starting point for this piece.
The ruins left by Spanish Civil War in Ciudad Universitaria, observed by a man and filmed by a group of post-war filmmakers, are a gesture of resistance against oblivion and bring the dead back to life.
Ciudad Universitaria became a trench, a republican symbol and the place through which Franco’s troops entered. The war erodes the landscape, it gives it a new meaning.
In Chile, the National Stadium built in 1938, became a concentration camp during the Military Dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. A man visits him after fifty years. He was there, he did not experience a war, although the Chilean right-wing wanted to call it that.
They couldn’t silence them. And there are the images of a group of male and female photographers who, during the eighties, dedicated themselves to photographing marches, protests, funerals and police repression.
The history of the vanquished is also a history of the resistance.
Credits
Written and Directed by: Carolina Astudillo Muñoz
Producer: Filmoteca Española / ISOLDA FILMS
Image: Luis Portocarrero / Américo Voltio / Carlos Lagos
Editing: Carolina Astudillo Muñoz
Assistant Editor: Paulina Quiroz Navarro
Voice: Carolina Astudillo Muñoz
Music: Lisa Bause
Sound Mix: Alejandra Molina
Testimony: Guillermo Orrego
Archive: Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos / Biblioteca Nacional de España
Films: Paseo por una guerra antigua (Filmoteca Española ) de Juan Antonio Bardem y Luis García Berlanga / El fondo del aire es rojo de Chris Marker / 1° de mayo, 1971 (Cineteca Universidad de Chile) de Luis Alberto Sanz.
With the support of Institut Ramon Llull / Catalan Films
Screenings
- Bienal Sur (Exhibition What Is Left for Us to Talk about. Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos. Santiago, Chile. 2023)
- Premios Pávez – Festival de Cine de Talavera de la Reina (Toledo, España. 2023)
- Festival Alcances (Official Selection. Cadiz, Spain. 2023)
- Cineteca Nacional (Diplomacy and Solidarity with Chile Film Cycle. Santiago, Chile, 2023)
- D’A Film Festival (Section Un impulso colectivo. Barcelona, Spain 2023)
- D’A Film Festival (Young Programmers Selection. Barcelona, Spain. 2023)
- Festival de Málaga. Cine Español. (Documentary Shorts Official Selection.. Spain. 2023).
- Université París 8 Cartography of temporalities in Spain in the 21st century (París, France. 2022)
- Cine Doré – Filmoteca Española (Madrid, Spain. 2022)