The Silence of Others

José Galantes cannot and will not accept that his torturer is living only a few metres away from him, unpunished. Maria Martín is fighting to ensure that her father’s bones are exhumed from a mass grave and buried next to her mother’s remains. However, an amnesty law passed by a large majority in the Spanish parliament in 1977 not only guaranteed the release of all political prisoners, but also prohibited prosecution of any of the crimes committed by Franco’s dictatorship. For this reason, many atrocities remain unsolved to this day. Over a period of six years, the filmmakers spoke to victims, relatives and human rights lawyers about their long-standing struggle to obtain admissions of guilt and the abolition of the amnesty law. Their film also describes how a movement that began in someone’s kitchen eventually succeeded in gaining sufficient awareness for suppressed injustice that an international trial was held, during which arrest warrants were issued against no fewer than twenty former perpetrators of Franco’s regime. This intelligently edited film suffused by symbolic visuals paints a picture of a still-divided society, torn between forgetting and coming to terms with its past. (Berlinale)