![]() ![]() ![]() The Silence of Others Directors Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar “This is not an issue we can keep hiding – at least 100,000 people are still buried by the side of the road in unmarked mass graves – and this is a Western democracy!” “A country is judged on how they treat their dead,” Carracedo says, quoting the leader of Spain’s newish center-right party Ciudadanos. It’s not easy.”įor decades, the victims suffered silently, until a small group started to demand answers, including the exhumation of their murdered relatives. “Perhaps we all collaborated in that silence.” But, “people don’t forget so easily. “For many years, we only wanted to erase from our heads all that time of bitterness and repression,” says Felisa Echegoyen, a woman featured in the film. Both sides agreed to a wide-ranging amnesty law that prevented prosecutions and even investigation of crimes against humanity. Although Franco’s victorious forces committed the vast majority of these atrocities, during the war and throughout the 40-year dictatorship, the Republicans were also responsible for serious crimes during the war. These included Franco’s Popular Party and the (newly legalized) Socialist Worker’s Party of Spain. ![]() They spent six years filming and 18 months editing 450 hours of footage into this moving and clear-eyed look at why there is no peace in silence.Ĭentral to the transition from dictatorship to democracy in Spain was this notion of moving forward by forgetting the past, agreed to by leaders of the main parties. “It really hurt me as unfinished business that my generation needs to deal with.” “I realized there was this other fight for dignity and justice going on in my own country,” Carracedo says. The idea for the movie emerged in 2010 as Carracedo and Bahar finished their last film, “Made in LA,” about Latina immigrants working in LA sweatshops. The film, which follows several Spaniards trying to uncover the fate of their loved ones or expose their tormentors, will have its New York premiere at the Human Rights Watch film festival on June 19 and 20. “The Silence of Others,” a film made by Spanish director Almudena Carracedo and her husband and filmmaking partner Robert Bahar, explores how people wronged long ago are fighting for recognition and justice today. Ascensión Mendieta enters the cemetery where her father’s remains are buried in a mass grave.įorty years on, though, the urge to remember is stronger than ever. ![]()
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