Film Screenings / Programs / Series
THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR IN THE BASQUE COUNTRY
October 6 – October 10
Film is an art form that can be studied as a document, agent, and even new format of writing history. To commemorate the 75th anniversary of the bombings of Durango and Guernica during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), we will be presenting a selection of films that reflect the traces the war has left on Basque cinema. During the war, the propaganda films promoted by the president of the Basque government, Lendakari Aguirre, which called for international solidarity with the Basques, had their counterpoint in the aggressive fascist propaganda documentaries of the Franco regime. Following the war, the victorious faction used the cinema to impose its monopolistic reading of history, while the international memory of tragedies like that of Guernica is now, thanks in large part to the cinema, a symbol of struggle against the barbarism of war. Finally, the death of Franco led to a new freedom to address other aspects of the Civil War in the Basque country which had previously been silenced. As Susan Sontag pointed out, there are horrors without a name because they lack images. In the last three decades, the filmmakers presented in this series, mainly Basques, have used the cinema to vaccinate us against oblivion.
Organized and funded by Etxepare Basque Institute, with the collaboration of Filmoteca Vasca, the Ministry of Culture of Spain-ICAA, and Spain Culture New York-Consulate General of Spain, member organization of Spain Arts & Culture
