Over the course of an intense hour and a half, directors Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar, intelligently transport us from sadness to hope, with stirring testimonies, historical documents and intimate, raw scenes of real life in this award-winning documentary about the Spanish Civil War, as it is controversially termed.
The Silence of Others charts the case against Madrid police inspector Antonio González Pacheco, aka ‘Billy the Kid’ – a sadistic individual who held a high position in Franco’s Political Brigade and has faced serious charges, for example torture, alongside other personalities from Franco’s regime – including former interior minister Rodolfo Martín Villa who has been accused by Argentinean human rights layers of participating in the killing of the country’s citizens.
«The Spanish state is the second country with most common pits in the world, just after Cambodia.»
A raw melancholy accompanies the film from start to finish. The melancholy of 40 years of forgetfulness due to legal commandments, after 40 years of brutal repressions under military dictatorship. In total, some 80 years of state barbarism and legal normalisation of that barbarism.
Eighty years between the murders of the military coup d’état, wrongfully called the Spanish Civil War; the post-war firing squads; torture on the grounds of political affiliation; stolen babies; disappearances and executions … the list could go on.
One cannot walk through the fields of Spain without feeling defeat piercing all the way to the bone. Defeat of those who lost the war and continue to lose – now in court. It’s the defeat of justice, the defeat of democracy, and the defeat of decency.
Fighting against the ‘Law of Oblivion’
On the side of the victims, the lead characters are a courageous and persistent group of civilians who find the answers to their claims in Argentina at the hands of Judge María Servini de Cubría. Through the long and winding process, some also find the end of their days trying to outlive the silence that Spain keeps imposing on its citizens.
These individuals that were once highly regarded policemen and politicians, with international arrest warrants, still roam freely today thanks to Spain’s diplomatic pressure and legal favouritism. This Spain, the shameless one, is the one standing proud on its undeniable victory, insisting on its dominance, displeased by the persistence of the defeated that just won’t lay itself to rest.
Why would it have to continue to reaffirm a rule already conquered so long ago? And this might just be their most elusive reflection: what kind of a rule is to be maintained through violence, torture, murder, secrecy and institutionalised silence? Such is the rule of Franco, the National-Catholicism, the rule of the House of Bourbon.
The personalities, such as former minister Villa, went on to hold positions of importance in the institutions of this half-baked democracy born out of ‘the Law of Oblivion’. One might term it the ‘Law of the Thimblerig’. While satisfying the popular outcry for amnesty for Franco’s regime prisoners, incarcerated during dictatorship, it also displayed tacit approval for forgetting all the crimes committed by the regime.
Amnesty for all. Amnesty for the prisoners after jail and amnesty for the murderers before jail. All in all to silence a military class eager to return to the ways of the late General.
This is the same democracy that still tries to compare itself with Europe’s more rigorous governments; rising internationally while standing on the mountai buried bones composed of brothers and sisters, cousins and neighbours.
Nothing is true until it bleeds
Spain has more than 2,000 known mass graves and hundreds of thousands of victims from the era lie across the land. Someone once told me that in Spain, nothing is true until it bleeds. But, it is not blood that is sought by the heralds of this civilian movement, which finds hope in search of truth and authentic reconciliation that can only be attained through responsibility and justice – and not forgetfulness.
Without ever abandoning the journalistic documentary genre, The Silence of Others cruises with a deliberately slow and serious rhythm, like a Holy Week procession, mirroring the civilians’ ceaseless work, which, little by little, seeks to open cracks in the monolith of post-Francoism obliviousness.
The compelling story retains an emotional pulse throughout. The directors remind us that there was never one Spain, or even two, but rather a conglomeration of individual and shared experiences meaning something different for each member of the population.
To and from the cemetery
Nothing is simple in a country that sustained the most ruthless manifestation of Catholicism. Catholicism found its footing in this country of militaries, bulls, and landowners, and continued it with its inquisitorial reign – the iron-clad domination of souls and lives that ensured the terrible moral oppression in wartime. The church suffocated the aspirations of young people, and robbed babies from women suspected of not being akin to the regime. The Church has termed the Civil War a «crusade» lending religious legitimacy to Franco’s actions, tacitly condoning the murderers of the people.
Their rule rested on the fear of mass graves, of torture and disappearances. The same church that allowed the dictator to enter topped by a white mantle, a privilege usually reserved exclusively for the Pope and Francisco Franco.
The film’s musical score, arranged by Leonardo Heiblum and Jacobo Lieberman – brief and concise yet nuanced – helps to provide a sense of emotion which might otherwise be hard to convey. It is a musical arrangement that disappears when we are presented with the cruder testimonies of the tortured – before the Argentinean judge or in front of the camera – while unravelling the barbarities they suffered at the hands of the Political Police. The musical montage evolves to culminate in Children of Spain, by Luis Pastor. The song is a small treasure by a songwriter who puts the shame of Spain into words – a song about repression and defeat. Yet he is singing to the dignity of the Spain that is always walking to and from the cemetery.
