Spanish Film Festival held at Lahore

The selection of films by the Spanish counsel reveals a nation still haunted by memories of a brutally divided past while trying to reconcile. Spanish cinema is remarkably liberal (need look no further than Almadovar’s fantastic characters) and so it’s rare to find Franco’s Nationalists given any aplomb for their victory over the left. Yet the persistent attempts to make sense of the horrors of history of your nation so cruelly bifurcated reflects advanced cinematic maturity and national integrity and strength.


La Colmena (The Beehive), Mario Camus 1982

Stories of characters in a time of war with its accompanying indigence. Focus is on a grueling reality – a reality so numbingly pervasive it fails to pose any conflicts. Moral values, class differences, political affiliations are rendered more or less irrelevant. As there are no real conflicts, there are no resolutions, epiphanies or transformations. After all, a time of war is not the best time for reflection or provoking existentialist inquiries. Impecunious they may be, but those who rendez-vous at the Beehive café find ways to cherish life and love.


Los Santos Inocentes (The Innocent Saints), Mario Camus 1984

A much acclaimed film whose central characters jointly won the Best Actor awards at Cannes for their roles as servants of a Spanish aristocratic family. Pablo is willing to abase himself to remain in his Master’s good books doubling in a canine-role, sniffing and collecting pheasants that are shot down. When Pablo breaks a leg, the disappointed hunt-a-holic Master enrolls the crass and senile brother-in-law of Pablo, Azarias for help during the hunts.

The movie is at times embarrassingly ideological and while the concluding sequence provides some consolation, the overall critique of the Spanish aristocracy is too didactic thus destroying the film’s cinematic value.


Soldados de Salamina (Soldiers of Salami), David Trueba 2003


Lola researches about Mazas, a leader of the Falange, a fascist group during the Spanish Civil War, who managed to escape the execution squad. The puzzling sequence of events compels Lola, an emotionally ailing writer, to go on a journey tracing Mazas’ life as a captive of the leftist Republicans in the late 1930’s. In the process she discovers heroes where they are least likely to be found.

Two stories unfold in this film. We find that it wasn’t Mazas’ escape from the execution squad into the forest of Bayolens which is intriguing. The legendary tale of Mazas evading the firing squad ends up as tangential albeit symbolic of the eventual Fascist victory. Instead the focus shifts to the mysterious, unknown soldier who sings ‘Sighs of Spain’ in the rain and who decides to let Mazas flee. Secondly Lola transform from an investigative journalist to a writer intimately involved with her subject, and one who promises to not let the heroes who honored their country and its people, fade away.

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Maybe one day, given a chance, Pakistan will own up to its past.

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