• Docs Ireland: The Silence of Others

    “Spain is covered in mass graves.” Buried wells of grief and pain stir underneath Spain’s transition from decades-long dictatorship to holiday destination democracy in Robert Bahar and Almudena Carracedo’s El silencio de otros (The Silence of Others), a sobering, difficult documentary with deep resonance for our own state and its preoccupation with protocols of remembering and forgetting. Mass executions, concentration camps, torture stations, stolen babies. Francoist Spain was a horror story, one that occupies less space in cultural memory than comparable collections of atrocities. Part of the reason for this is the so-called Pact of Forgetting, a bill passed following…