IT SCARES Catalan director Judith Colell that many people now appear to believe that Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and even the Nazis were “not so bad”.
That’s one of the reasons she has made a film based on a little-known story of villagers who risked their lives to help people escape across the Pyrenees to Spain during the Second World War.
“I look at what is happening in Europe with a lot of worry, and I think that’s why it’s important to make films like this because it’s important to preserve the memory,” she told the Sunday National.
“Here in Spain, for example, you listen to young people saying, ‘Franco was not so bad. The fascism was not so bad. Franco made a lot of good things’. But they don’t know anything about what it is like living in a dictatorship, living with a far-right government.”
Although Spain currently has a left-wing government, she is worried this will change in the near future.
“They are attacking us from everywhere,” said Colell, who is travelling to Scotland this week for screenings of her film Frontera in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Tiree as part of Tiree’s Sea Change Festival.
One of the reasons Colell decided to make Frontera was to show how desperate and dangerous life was for people living under far-right rulers.
“This film is talking about the past but also talking about the present because a lot of people are crossing borders,” she said. “The far right in Europe is trying to stop these people, and there are those who help the refugees, those who will never help them and those who don’t know what to do.”
Colell pointed out that people don’t leave their countries if life is good.
“They leave their countries because they escape from war, they escape from hunger, they escape from genocides,” she said. “They escape from a lot of things, and we have to help them. In all our history, people have been crossing frontiers, so the film is a mirror that relates to the present.”
Set in 1943, Frontera tells the little-known story of a group of Pyrenees villagers who defied the rules of Franco’s regime to save hundreds of refugees arriving from France.
Colell, who has spent many holidays in the Pyrenees, was previously unaware that so many people fled across the mountain region during the Second World War.
“I didn’t know anything about this story, and I thought it was important to recover this memory,” she said.
“For example, if you look at Germany just now, that is a country that, for obvious reasons, was very scared and very against the far right and now the far right is winning elections.
“This is happening, and the only thing that we can do is to try to educate new generations to see that the 1940s were the worst and most terrifying period in European history.
“We have to try to avoid going back there.”
An optimist by nature, Colell confesses that at the moment she does feel pessimistic about the ascendancy of the far right across Europe.
“We have to fight against it,” she said. “It seems there are people lying to make us forget the past or telling us it was not so terrible.
“The German party that won the elections last week, they want to minimise the Nazis, and this is what they are doing here in my country too. This is something that scares me a lot, so we have to show that fascism was very, very bad. It was one moment that was very dark for humankind, and it was a moment that we have to fight to not repeat.”
Colell despairs about the malign effect of social media.
“It’s not helping because it’s very easy now to lie,” she said. “Nobody checks what is a lie or what is true, and some people believe what they read or what they see. This is something that should worry us a lot. They can lie, and nobody checks it. It’s not only random people, it is also some governments; some leaders that are telling lies all the time. People believe them, and this is a big problem.”
Although she is pessimistic about the rise of the far right, Colell still believes people should do what they can to fight against it.
Her film focuses on one man in particular, Manel Grau, a civil servant with a Republican background who is trying to keep his head down and out of trouble with the Franco regime.
However, at the risk of his own life and that of his family, he decides he cannot stand back and let people perish at the hands of the Nazis so helps them escape.
“The film is an homage to all these people who help,” said Colell. “People do decide to change and not to stand back with their arms crossed. Something that is very important in this film is all the people who decide to risk their lives to help people they don’t know.”
She added: “It’s crucial to encourage people that we can help, take risks and decide that we are not going to stand with our arms crossed but help any way we can.
“Now there are a lot of people who are helping all these people who are crossing here in Spain, also in Italy, in Greece and in other places and even putting their lives at risk. This makes me have hope.”
Professor Judith Colell, president of the Catalan Film Society, will introduce a special screening of Frontera/Frontier in Glasgow on September 17, Tiree on September 19 and Edinburgh on September 21. The festival is Scotland’s only annual festival dedicated to championing women in film.screenargyll.co.uk/sea-change-film-fest/
