REMEMBERING FRANCO

Despite what its title might suggest, REMEMBERING FRANCO does not commemorate a dictator, nor the time of the Francoist dictatorship exactly. It evokes a point during those times, but above all it evokes a place, the district of La Herradura, and the people who lived there back then. According to the narrator, a man from a Nordic country, this small coastal town in the province of Granada, a sort of Mediterranean Arcadia, “birthplace of Phoenicians, Romans, Moors, Jews and even Christians,” was a refuge of happiness, stillness, beauty, wisdom, magical evenings, endless beaches and unforgettable memories. Its diverse inhabitants (including Catalan haters of Bob Dylan and Russians who make their neighbours weep by reading Pasternak), who seem to be suspended out of their time in history, are nevertheless concerned about the Bandung Conference of 1955 or the marriage of the Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh with Zeng Xueming.
 
REMEMBERING FRANCO is like a scrapbook, a collection of stories and fragments of life shaped by its director, who filters and sieves out irrelevant anecdotes and memories to use repetition and returns to build the particular microcosm of this “fortunate town”. The film weaves playful and ironic intentions into its game-like feel, experimenting with the magic of stories, with a melancholic dimension, almost elegiac (all shared, in a different way, by the voice of the narrator and the filmmaker), in its work to transmit and transform memories from a real place and real people.

Miguel Zozaya