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Almudena Carracedo Presented El Silencio de Otros at the 16th FICM

Marco Mejía @MiqkelMejia

As part of the special screenings of the 16th edition of the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM), the Spanish documentary El Silencio de Otros was presented on Thursday night, with the presence of its co-director, Almudena Carracedo, who thanked Ambulante for giving distribution to the project that took several years to complete before starting the screening.

"Thank you all for coming, it is an honor that FICM has welcomed us with love, thanks to Ambulante because the documentary will be everywhere, we have been traveling with the film for eight months, creating dialogue in different countries. For me it is important that you are here today to see this project in which we've worked for almost seven years."

Filmed over six years, with a direct and intimate style, the film follows the victims and survivors of the long regime of Francisco Franco, who continue to seek justice to this day, as they organize the so-called "Querella Argentina" and they confront a "pact of oblivion" about the crimes inflicted upon them.

After the show, the co-director addressed the audience's concerns about the documentary in a panel also comprised by the vice-president of FICM, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Batel, Ambulante's director, Paulina Suárez and the poet and cultural promoter, Eduardo Vázquez.

The director of Ambulante said the project is "a rigorous and very well researched documentary that's narrated in an agile and moving way so that the audience is a participant in the story". She also said that it is necessary "to show it in Mexico for plenty of reasons since it is common that every week, we find more clandestine graves throughout the country."

Almudena Carracedo emphasized that the story emerged from the need to try to do justice, and although it is a subject she dealt with since her adolescence, it was only a few years ago that she found a voice to raise:

"The project started when I was young, and it is a subject with which I have lived, but it was not a topic that we wanted to organize at that time. After conceiving it, the process was difficult because sometimes you have doubts as a creator but more as a human being because you don't know if you can do that struggle justice, it is a big responsibility because we realized that the movie was larger than us".

While touching sensitive points that fall under the Spanish crown, the co-director chose to premiere the documentary in other countries to obtain global credibility and then return to her native country to present the project:

"Our strategy was to start outside of Spain with the idea of reaching our country with a certain stamp of approval, therefore, the premiere in Spain just happened last weekend, but the reaction of the audience has been exciting and overwhelming. And we would like to show it to the government of Spain, we would like to sed it to them. If they want, of course".

During 2018, this project has been by the Moscow Film Festival, Favorite Film Festival, Sheffield International Documentary Festival and the Human Rights Watch New York Film Festival, among others.