Imagine not knowing, for decades, the fate of your parents or other family members, who were victims of enforced disappearance organized by an authoritarian regime. This has been a reality for people in Spain for a long time. After all, Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco, who led the overthrow of the republic and then ruled from 1939 until his death in 1975, still casts a long, often painful, shadow. Atlas of disappearance (Atlas de la désaparición), a new documentary by Colombian director and researcher Manuel Correa (Form nowHe is trying to change this by confronting the legacy of enforced disappearance during his regime after 80 years of silence.
Following an investigation to help find the remains of the victims and shed light on a dark part of Spanish history, the doc combines cutting-edge technologies, such as forensic architecture and paper archives in a historical investigation that draws on the director’s experience working within an international and interdisciplinary research organization for forensic architecture, based at Goldsmiths, University of London. The goal: to overcome institutional resistance, bureaucratic obstacles and other factors that prevent families from getting answers to their decades-long questions.
World premiere on Friday, March 13, in the F:ACT Prize section of the 23rd edition of CPH:DOX, Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival. Atlas of disappearance It follows several families on their endless journey through jungles of bureaucracy, legality, and social hurdles. “For more than 20 years, Franco’s regime quietly organized the exhumation and moved more than 33,000 bodies from mass graves across Spain to the Valley of the Fallen, the massive mausoleum built to glorify Franco’s victory,” the film’s press notes explain.
To support the families’ research efforts, Correa founded the Documentary Research Bureau, a group of geographers, architects, and artists. Their investigation used digital maps, citizen archives, and new forensic techniques to reconstruct what has been hidden and kept behind a curtain of silence. She also exploited the families’ private archives and insights into the disappearances, including documents, letters and memories, which paint a picture of personal loss and the systematic destruction of evidence.
Corea worked as a director and cinematographer in Atlas of disappearance He co-edited the document with Ivan Guarnizo. The producers are Ana Geralt Gris, Jorge Caballero Ramos and Emil Olsen. Sales are being managed by Agencia Audiovisual Freak and Artefacto Films.
Watch a trailer for Atlas of disappearance here.
Ahead of the film’s world premiere, Corea spoke to THR About how the fate of Franco’s victims has long been a taboo topic in Spain, the emotional toll of secrecy and silence, the painstaking work of helping their families find answers, how the methods of violence and repression have become more sophisticated, and what’s next for him next. Atlas of disappearance.
How did you get involved in investigating Spanish history and political violence as a filmmaker from Colombia?
I’ve been researching disappearances my entire career, especially in Colombia, where I worked with mothers whose children had disappeared. My work is very slow, because I work a lot with communities and ask people what they need.
I met Silvia Navarro Pablo, the president of the association that wants to remove the disappeared from the Valley of the Fallen that you see in the film, through an exchange of emails. I thought: “I will go to Spain as a tourist to meet her.” We had a conversation, and then I felt: “These people need help.”
For me, films are very important because I am of course a filmmaker. But what really excites me about films is the process of making them, because suddenly you find yourself in a position where you have resources that you can use to make things happen. Therefore, I created a bureau of researchers, including mathematicians and geographers, to try to create a truer and more complete version of what happened in the Valley of the Fallen.
How did you approach structuring your work and findings into a documentary narrative?
This was actually one of the hardest things, because we had three victims who had more information, but even their information was full of holes. So, it took a lot of research, going into archives, creating models and visualizations.
What this film is trying to do is use modern tools. As patterns of violence and methods of oppression become more complex and technologically sophisticated, so do the tools for investigating and telling stories about them. It has also become more sophisticated and sophisticated. With that in mind, for me, it was important to tell the story as it unfolds, as we look for it, and as we start to discover things.
The biggest crime in these cases is silence, right? You take these people, you kill them, and you don’t say anything about it. They completely deleted them and put them in mass graves. They don’t even tell you where they will be in 20 years. The government goes to extract them and secretly transport them somewhere and not tell anyone. So it’s all about confidentiality. The film also mentions monks [of The Benedictine Abbey of the Holy Cross in the Valley of the Fallen]which hinders shooting indoors, which is very telling. It is a continuation of this silence.
If you’re never told anything, you’ll never have an answer. In this case, getting an answer is the same as getting a body. For a lot of these people, without a body, you can’t grieve.
How long did you work on it? Atlas of disappearance? It seems as if every time we see families and your team discovering something, new questions arise, or a wall of silence appears.
Yes, this is correct. It took eight years, so we needed patience. It was a very, very difficult project. She was mighty. Whenever we looked through the door, the door would close. Or we would talk to someone, and they would give us wrong information, like monks. It is full of misinformation, and this misinformation will also lead us down paths that were not helpful.
That was part of coming up with a clear narrative that could grab you emotionally and could help tell that story. We’ve done a lot of research, and hopefully we can shape it in a compelling way, and hopefully offer a narrative that has some hope, despite the difficulties. It is the hope that new ways of thinking and new methods of research can clarify past atrocities.
Atlas of disappearance It houses computers and all kinds of technology and gadgets. So, you have modern technology and mathematics and numbers that help you tell a story about human lives lost and human trauma. How important was it to focus on these human aspects in the film?
It was very important. When we talk about numbers, we are basically trying to represent scale, but in reality, we are not talking about numbers. We’re talking about life. We are talking about lives ended, others interrupted, many families destroyed and still suffering from this. So when we talk about numbers, they represent a lot of lives.
That’s why it was important for us, for example, to read out loud the names of the people we know are buried there and to take time to read the names of those who disappeared in the film. This is also political [choice]Because it is a way to bring them back. When we were directing that, it was really huge. We spent about 70 hours reading the names. All the people who read the names did so for an hour, and we asked them to take their time, because these were the names of missing people. And many of the people reading their names broke down while reading.
We use mathematics, but we really wanted to do the exact opposite of the political project of disappearances, which is naming. These people have disappeared, erased from history. Now we read their names. We are bringing them back, in a sense, at least symbolically.
How have Spanish governments’ attitudes toward disclosing information about victims of the Franco regime changed over time?
In Spain, the Valley of the Fallen is something that has not yet been dealt with by the current government, which is really trying to do so. But before that, no one was talking about it. When I started making the film, you could say it was one of the more things Banned. I was talking about it in the street, and people were looking at me. It was really taboo. I think things have changed now, partly because of the government [led by Prime MinisterPedro Sánchezof theSpanish Socialist Workers’ Party since 2018] It has put her in the spotlight.
How universal is the story Atlas of disappearance?
It is a political position of mine that every global story is a local story first. It is very sad to see that there is a very tragic turn of events now in world politics. When I started making the film, of course there were wars, but not like now. We are witnessing wars of attrition not seen in a century in terms of scale and rhetoric. We are seeing massacres left and right, and people are once again talking about mass graves. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen this kind of scale, especially in the West. So it’s very worrying.
And in these wars that we are witnessing now, we also see something very similar to the logic of disappearance that the film deals with. We see a similar logic of misinformation. “No, I didn’t bomb this school. Oh, no, these mass graves are fake!”
Do you have any new film projects in development?
Yes, a movie about him [Martha Lucía González,] A judge in Colombia, in 1988, when she was only 30 years old, was assigned to investigate two massacres. She discovered that the military worked with drug traffickers to create a paramilitary army. Schools for killers were discovered. They had a school where they trained farmers how to become hired killers. The final test was to kill a person and cut him into pieces in less than five minutes. So it was absolutely brutal.
So this judge was able to do this investigation, and she started receiving death threats, and there was a car bomb to try to kill her. So the government decided that it could not keep her in Colombia and sent her to Indonesia as consul. Paulo Escobar sent hitmen to try to kill her but failed, but then killed her father in Colombia. Then she disappeared from the face of the Earth for 30 years [before resurfacing]. This is her story, a story I think Colombia needs to know.
