Observing Memories Issue 3 | Page 87

El silencio de otros (2018).
Directed by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar.
Produced by El Deseo. 95’ | ©El Deseo
a mass grave from the Franco period, carried out in relatives of people murdered by the regime, who
2000 in Priaranza del Bierzo in León. Over the years, are now fighting to give them a proper burial; the
the historical memory movement gradually acquired women whose babies were stolen at birth; and the
the scope and the size necessary for the pursuit of its people who were tortured at police headquarters. It
objective: to seek out the truth and to bring justice was the victims’ families who planted the seed of the
and redress for the victims of Francoism. movement for reparation, in which the symbolism
This background is important in order to
of a dignified burial would bring the peace that
understand why a trial became the subject of a many relatives sought through this process. María
documentary. The first archive images that appear at Martín and Ascensión Mendieta, two old women,
the beginning of the film evoke the events that make represent the tireless struggle of all those who work
up the “historical memory” in Spain and highlight to honour the memory of their relatives killed by
the existence of a pacto de olvido (literally, a “pact Franco. María has fought all her life for the right to
of forgetting”) of everything that happened before move her mother’s remains from a roadside ditch to
the legislation passed in 1977. Popularly known the town cemetery, a dream that sadly she had not
as the Amnesty Act, it was well received by the seen fulfilled by the time of her death in 2014. She
political prisoners of the dictatorship, although it gives chilling testimony of the response of the local
also provided protection for the people responsible Francoist authorities to her request to be allowed to
for state crimes under Francoism. This became bury her mother in the cemetery: «you’ll take her
known as “the Spanish model of impunity”: the to the cemetery when the frogs grow hair so stop
documentary shows the Basque politician Xabier bothering us – you don’t want us to do to you what
Arzalluz using this term in the Spanish parliament to we did to her». Ascensión, who died in September
describe the legislation. 2019, was able to give her father Timoteo a decent
Although the story is told by several people, the
film’s real protagonists are all of Franco’s victims:
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burial in 2017.
The number of babies stolen by the dictatorship
85