The Silence of Others

Imagine being attacked, and when the police arrive they tell you that you are under a legal obligation to forget what just happened to you. _El silencio de otros_ (_The Silence of Others_), is a documentary produced by Pedro Almodóvar about victims under the Franco dictature in Spain who are fighting for justice against **a 1979 law that literally says crimes against citizens under Franco must be forgotten**. (Google 'Pact of Forgetting' for a shock.) Hearing the stories of those people who were tortured, those children who watched their parents executed and thrown into mass graves, those women who had their children taken from them while still in the hospital after giving birth... I learned an enormous amount about the Franco regime and its aftermath, and left the cinema a total mess. _The Silence of Others_ simply is a film strong enough to teach and to wreck me. (Oh, and the neo-fascists holding Spanish flags emblazoned with the English message 'Make Spain Great Again' is an image thick with meaning.)