How are art and social reality connected? How can art respond to the horrors that happen in this world every day? At what point does art become political, at what point corrupted by the market? Leon Golub (1922–2004) works on huge canvases in his New York studio, uses press photos as models, distils gestures from them, applies paint, removes it, scrapes free what was hidden. The process has a violent side – like the martial motifs of his works. They show shootings, tortures or grotesque figures that enjoy their inhuman acts. These are motifs usually unearthed by investigative journalism in times of war. Now they are hung in an exhibition room supposedly free from the banal – and shock the viewer.

In life, people do things they are proud of, and others they are not proud of – but it is impossible not to be proud of having participated in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), even if the Spanish Republic and its alliance of International Brigades lost. This is one of the American veterans whose war memories – bitter, but marked by self-respect – are honoured by this film. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade consisted of US volunteers who fought against Spanish and German fascism and for democracy under adverse conditions and without party affiliations until 1939, while the US government pursued a strict and ultimately fatal policy of appeasement. A refreshingly undogmatic document with a wealth of fresh archive material.