This Spanish Dictatorship Documentary Is Now Streaming For Free in the Philippines
The Philippines is not exceptional in our questionable tendencies to forget the past. Like many nations, our country had to claw its way to democracy. But while it took us a peaceful revolution to build back what was rightfully ours, Spain’s transition had far more Orwellian undertones.
For the Iberian nation, the road to peace meant creating a “pact of forgetting” embedded in a 1977 Amnesty Law. In 1975, the Spanish dictator-general Francisco Franco passed away, leaving 100,000 dead in his wake. The pact sought to erase the bloody legacy of the general from national records in order to facilitate reconciliation between the rival parties.
Because of the pact, enablers of the regime were absolved of their crimes, while their victims were left to pick up the pieces of their shattered past.
In The Silence of Others, directors Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar follow the stories of men and women seeking justice for their families. For the last 40 years, Spanish courts have refused to hear their cases, citing the pact. The film documents their tireless fight, as they have taken their grievances to Argentina where they hope to find closure in international law.
The film also chronicles the story of José María Galante, a former student activist who found his torturer living less than a mile away from him. After several attempts to jail his abuser, Galante had to find alternative ways to seek justice. He was one of the key figures in mounting the complaint in Argentina, rather than in Spanish courts.
The film doesn’t hold back in portraying the generational trauma caused by the oppressive pact. Its 95-minute long runtime may seem as if it will overwhelm the general viewer, but the emotional build-up of decades of grief and anger are carefully plotted out in a delicate show of raw vulnerability.
The film, which premiered in 2018, won Best Feature Documentary in the 2019 Goya Awards and garnered the Audience Award in the 2018 Berlin International Film Festival.
Dictators rise and fall, but the strength of a nation will always lie in the hands of the people, should they choose to speak the truth to power. If there’s anything we can learn from the film, it’s that the fight to break national amnesia is one that should involve every single individual, not just the ones who remember.
The film is available to stream in the Philippines for free from March 25 to 27. Interested viewers can stream it here as part of Daang Dokyu’s ongoing Dokyu Power project, where Filipinos can find other documentaries to watch for free.
