What happened during the Spanish Civil War? What happened under Franco’s dictatorship? Sergi Casero Nieto, born in 1991, could get no answers from his mother or grandmother. Through this fictionalised autobiographical narrative, made up of childhood memories and video-projected archival documents, he investigates what he calls the “institutional amnesia” surrounding an essential chapter of his country’s history. Spanish school textbooks make no mention of the concentration camps, the hundreds of bodies thrown into mass graves or the complicity of the Church with the Francoist regime. The 1977 Amnesty Law forbids the prosecution of crimes committed under the dictatorship. This skilfully constructed piece raises the burning question of our relationship to the past in the face of such silence.

Hugues Le Tanneur