Between 1959 and 1981, the Franco regime had over 33,000 bodies transferred from more than 500 mass graves across Spain to the Valle de los Caídos – a monumental mausoleum erected to glorify the fascist victory. Decades later, relatives are still searching for the remains of their loved ones. Three families follow in the footsteps of the disappeared and encounter bureaucratic, legal and social obstacles that persist to this day. Drawing on director Manuel Correa’s own research as part of Forensic Architecture, a research agency that investigates state and corporate violence, the film reconstructs in meticulous detail what the regime sought to conceal. Digital maps, citizens’ archives, official documents and new forensic technologies reveal what remained hidden for decades. The result is a topography of terror that visualises the extent of systematic violence and brings to light the history buried beneath fascist monumentalism.

Seggen Mikael

Among hundreds of hours of unseen 1980s footage documenting the rehabilitation of Aubervilliers, a Parisian working-class suburb, filmmaker Giuseppe Schillaci recognised 15-year-old French-Algerian Fatsah Bouyahmed, then an ordinary boy who would later become an actor. Suffering memory loss after an accident, Fatsah agrees to revisit the neighbourhood he always wanted to leave through the archival footage. As the images are decoded, two recoveries of memory converge: Fatsah’s life and that of a 1980s working-class suburb. His stories of family and neighbours bring faces and lives out of the archival anonymity. A fluid dialogue between past and present, VHS footage and television archives, and fragments of Fatsah’s memory recreates the visual texture of the 80s while resurrecting forms of togetherness that, seen today, feel improbable.French and immigrant residents shared a belief in the common good through community work, neighbourhood TV, football, rap contests and collective efforts to improve life, as officials involved them in measures to tackle the “malaise of the suburbs.” A forgotten collective struggle, suspended between nostalgia, the elusive truth of memory and socio-politics, before the already lurking racism, segregation and economic inequalities hardened and later erupted in the rage of the banlieues. By connecting one man’s recovered memory to the unheard working-class voices Schillaci subtly plants a doubt: has our belief in the inevitability of today’s unjust realities made those forms of solidarity seem utopian, and is a better future still possible?

Anca Păunescu