Todo es cárcel

A woman crosses a country, camera in hand. She speaks, asks questions, records voices and landscapes. She appears to be carrying out research on the concentration camps operated by Francisco Franco’s fascist dictatorship in Spain—places of which little now remains: no memories, no signs, no traces. As the journey unfolds, one landscape follows another and they gradually merge together, sketching out an imagined country in which distant geographies are joined by cuts: from Galicia to Alicante, from Castile to Madrid. Distance dissolves and difference falls away, everything held together by the same invisible thread running through the whole country: oblivion, historical amnesia, a past concealed and unseen. The film’s delicate central fiction—that of a protagonist gathering material for a future documentary—intersects with another fictional thread: the letters written by two Republican fighters separated in the aftermath of the Civil War. Their voices begin in pride, commitment and dignity, before gradually descending into the misery of the fascist dictatorship, as timeframes begin to fold into one another. The past is not the past, but rather another layer of the present: that of a country still in thrall to its history and indebted to those who defended it. (Gonzalo de Pedro Amatria)

In the presence of Eloy Enciso, Marta Diaz and Beli Martínez (production).

With the kind support of Accion Cultural Española.

Eloy Enciso (selection): PIC-NIC (2007), ARRAIANOS (2012), LONGA NOITE (2019)