Sinopsis
Tras el éxito de Los colonos del Caudillo, su primer acercamiento al legado de la dictadura franquista, en La Causa contra Franco la pareja de cineastas Dietmar Post (Alemania) y Lucía Palacios (España) dirigen su mirada hacia uno de los capítulos más controvertidos de la historia europea reciente: el presunto exterminio organizado que tuvo lugar durante el golpe, la guerra y la dictadura encabezada por Franco, tras haberse hecho con el poder por la fuerza con la ayuda de Alemania, Italia y Portugal. Hasta el día de hoy, nadie ha sido juzgado por los crímenes cometidos ni se ha reparado a las víctimas. Más de 100.000 personas continúan desaparecidas.
Después de que el intento de Baltasar Garzón de juzgar estos crímenes fracasase en 2010, víctimas del franquismo presentan ese mismo año una querella en Buenos Aires, la conocida como “Querella Argentina”. En 2013 la jueza argentina María Servini emite órdenes de detención internacional contra 24 altos cargos franquistas. Los directores la acompañan durante su primer viaje a España para tomar declaración a víctimas en 2014.
La causa contra Franco presenta casos de crímenes concretos incluidos en la Querella Argentina. Al intercalar material de archivo en parte inédito con el metraje actual, y al contextualizar histórica y judicialmente cada caso, la película ofrece nuevas evidencias. En una de las escenas clave, las declaraciones de uno de los imputados se contraponen con las de la querellante, la jueza de instrucción y la abogada defensora de las víctimas.
Lucía Palacios y Dietmar Post trabajaron en esta película más de 10 años. Idearon el proyecto en 2008, cuando el juez Garzón comenzó a investigar los crímenes del franquismo. Desde un principio, los cineastas tuvieron claro que era esencial hablar con las partes implicadas en un posible juicio e invitaron no solo a varios querellantes a participar en la película, sino también a todos los acusados por Servini. Gracias a su insistencia, lograron establecer contacto con personas de ambos lados, incluida la hija de uno de los generales involucrados en el golpe de 1936, quien conserva un retrato enmarcado en plata del líder nazi alemán Hermann Göring, regalo personal de éste a su padre. También invitaron a participar al Rey Felipe II y al Presidente del Gobierno Mariano Rajoy, quienes rechazaron la invitación.
La causa contra Franco arroja luz sobre un episodio casi olvidado de la historia europea y plantea la pregunta: ¿Podría una querella presentada en Argentina desembocar en el último gran juicio contra una dictadura fascista del siglo XX? ¿El Núremberg español?
October 2017
Franco´s Settlers
Film available as DVD and VOD here
Synopsis
Somewhere on the high plains of La Mancha in Spain resides a village that carries the name of its creator, Francisco Franco. The translation for the village’s name Llanos del Caudillo is The High Plains of the Caudillo. Caudillo is the equivalent to the German Fuehrer (Hitler) or the Italian Duce (Mussolini).
Llanos del Caudillo was one of over 300 settlement villages built during the dictatorship of General Franco between 1939 and 1975. The ideological goal of these communities was to create the new fascist man.
The film portraits this unordinary small town as if we were looking through a magnifying glass, reviewing the Spanish history since Franco took power until the present days, when judge Baltasar Garzón, famous for having prosecuted Augusto Pinochet, has been convicted by the Spanish Supreme Court and banned from office for 11 years because of his attempt to investigate the crimes committed during Franco´s dictatorship.
Franco’s Settlers is a contemporary evaluation of the figure of the dictator Franco; a discreet and calm attempt to dissect recent Spanish history and to review how some Spaniards deal with the heritage of their past.
Dietmar Post
Dietmar was born in Germany in 1962. He worked as a printer before studying Theater, Film, and Spanish at the Freie Universitat of Berlin and the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. Between 1995-2003 he lived and worked in New York City where he studied at NYU Film School. There he shot his first short film, the award-winning Bowl of Oatmeal, followed by various fictional short stories and documentaries.
Dietmar Post is member of the Association of German Documentary Filmmakers (AG Dok).
Lucía Palacios
Lucía was born in Spain in 1972. Studied Audio-Visual Communications at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid and Film at the NYU Film School of New York. From 1996-2000 she worked as a producer for Canal+ and TVE while living in the United States. Since 1997, she has produced and directed various of her own short films and documentaries with her partner Dietmar Post, as well as others.
Lucía also works as a voice-over talent.
play loud! productions
Lucía Palacios and Dietmar Post have been working together for over twenty years.
Their first collaboration, Cloven Hoofed, is a short fictional film which celebrated its release in the 1998 Rotterdam Film Festival. Living in New York City between 1995 and 2002, Dietmar and Lucía created play loud! productions in 1997. Since then, they have focused on producing not only films but music as well. In 2002, they relocated to Berlin where they presently reside.
In 2008, they were the recipients of the most prestigious award in German television, the Adolf-Grimme-Preis Award, for their documentary Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback.
In 2006, their film German Pop and Circumstance was nominated for the same award.
For the past ten years, they have been creating an extensive archive under the title`play loud! (live) music series´ which focuses on the preservation and archiving of music, inspired by Alan Lomax, John Peel and the first generation of “direct cinema”. In the same manner, they publish their films under their own label play loud! music.
In 2018 they release the DVD of their film Franco´s Settlers accompanied by a book titled Franco´s Settlers: An example of the marginalization of the investigative documentary. With this book they open up a discussion based on the function and significance of the documentary in democratic societies and how neoliberalism has influenced the aesthetic and content of documentary films.
Filmography (selected)
1996 – Bowl of Oatmeal (short film)
1998 – Cloven Hoofed (short film)
2002 – Reverend Billy & The Church of Stop Shopping (documentary)
2006 – Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback (documentary)
2009 – Klangbad: Avant-garde In The Meadows (documentary)
2013 – Franco’s Settlers (documentary)
2014 – Donna Summer: Hot Stuff (documentary)
2015 – Damo Suzuki & Sound Carriers: Live At Marie Antoinette (documentary)
2016 – German Pop & Circumstance (documentary)
2018 – Franco on Trial (documentary)
