Guernica(2016)
The fates of Henry - an American correspondent - and Teresa, one of the Republic's censors during the Spanish Civil War.
The fates of Henry - an American correspondent - and Teresa, one of the Republic's censors during the Spanish Civil War.
Alain Resnais & Robert Hessen use the famous Picasso mural "Guernica" in combination with newspaper headlines in an anti-war cry against the Spanish Civil War. Narration by Jacques Pruvost highlights the Guernica atrocity of April 1937, followed by a poem by Paul Eluard read by María Casares to a discordant score by Guy Bernard.
The fictional town of Villa Romero is the set upon which the events of Spain's civil war play out. Villa Romero is home to Vandale (Mariangela Melato) a witch, count Cerralbo (Bento Urago) a powerless land baron, and his four sons. Three of Cerralbo's sons are ruthless sadists who pillage the countryside, but the fourth, Goya (Ron Faber), is an artist challenging authority and the church.
A group of children evacuated from Spain to Belgium are waiting for the Civil War end which will allow them to go back home.
An idealist sculptor is inspired to carve a large relief on a cliffside, commemorating the spot where his pacifist father was executed for his beliefs and for protesting the saber-rattling of the times. The sculptor's inspiration was his visit to New York to see Picasso's famous "Guernica," portraying the inhumanity and horrors of war, a painting that was subsequently returned to Spain. When a young woman watches an interview with the sculptor on television, she is motivated to pay him a visit and the two strike up a relationship. He loans her his apartment in Budapest, though he refuses to sleep with her. Meanwhile, her lover becomes jealous of the sculptor and goes to visit him himself, upon which the two immediately clash because their views on life and politics are so different. Margit has been away to track down the painting of Guernica so as to understand what has inspired her sculptor friend, and when she comes back, she decides to marry her lover.
Through one year we follow the Norwegian artist Vebjørn Sand towards his exhibition: Guernica a turning point.
The infamous bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, commemorated by Picasso's famous painting, led directly to the evacuation of four thousand Basque children to Britain. It was the largest single influx of refugees ever to arrive in this country and the first to consist solely of children. The British Government did not want them here - so it was that an enormous voluntary organization stepped in to care for the children - much to the annoyance of the Government! Everybody expected their stay to be brief, but the conflict dragged on. By the end of the Spanish Civil War many of the children literally had nothing and nobody to return to and remained in Britain for a lifetime. This is the story of the Basque children - of those that returned to Spain and those that made Britain their home. It is the story of a remarkable grass-roots organization that cared for them and the conflict it generated with a British Government which saw the children as a political embarrassment.