Screening of the documentary: El retratista, de Sergi Bernal i Alberto Bougleux
- Title:
- Screening of the documentary: El retratista, de Sergi Bernal i Alberto Bougleux
- When:
- Fri, 19. June 2015
- Category:
- Altres Activitats Històric EN
Description
Screening of the documentary "El retratista" de Sergi Bernal et Alberto Bougleux
Friday, June 19, 2015
MUME, at 19h
EL RETRATISTA
Duration 52’
Direction, photography and editing: Alberto Bougleux
Original idea and research: Sergi Bernal
Year of production: 2013
Language: Catalan, Spanish
Subtitles: Spanish, French, Italian and English
A Republican rural school from the '30's.
A lost world seen with the eyes of children learning to write.
The utopia of a teacher truncated by war and dictatorship.
A documentary and a collective challenge in memory of the victims of the Francoist repression.
As part of the complementary events of the exhibition "Unearthing the silence" by Sergi Bernal, we propose the screening of the documentary "The Retratist" (2013).
In 1934, the young professor of Mont-roig del Camp, Antoni Benaiges, was assigned to a village in Burgos. His teaching project is truncated in the first days of the Civil War when he was shot, but his legacy will reappear 75 years later.
Andrés is the teacher of a very special school: the Experimental Freinet of San Andrés de Tuxtla, in Mexico. This school has a simple project: teaching children how to think and be free.
The school also hides a secret: it is the story of Antonio Benaiges, a Catalan teacher shot during the Civil War, who, like Andrés, wanted to teach children freedom. Andrés will show his students his story, on a journey to the mass graves of the Civil War and the origins of the modern and democratic school.
SYNOPSIS
School year 1934-35. The "Ministry of Education" of the Second Spanish Republic Square assigned school teacher in rural Bañuelos de Bureba, a village of Burgos today comprises 30 people, the young Catalan teacher Antoni Benaiges
A few months after arriving in the village, Antoni Benaiges bought a printing house for his students. His idea, which is inspired by the French pedagogue Celestine Freinet, is that the school must give children the tools to express their more natural knowledge and skills, which traditional education usually ignores.
The excitement for the experiment is very great, and during the first school year the school of Bañuelos de Bureba publishes the first notebooks fully written and illustrated by their own students. They talk about everyday life in a village in the thirties, with the words and drawings of some children who learn to print with the printing press. One of the notebooks published illustrates a photographer's visit to the village. It is entitled "The Retratista".
Bañuelos's notebooks start circulating among the "Freinet schools" throughout the republican state and even go abroad, to schools in France, Scotland, Mexico, and Cuba. Those little school publications survive thanks to their subscribers: among them are village farmers, teachers and even the President of the Republic Niceto Alcalá Zamora.
The following year the school published a new notebook: The sea: Vision of children who have never seen it. For that summer, Antoni has another ambitious project in mind: he wants to take his students from the village to Barcelona to see the sea. But it is July 1936, the first days of the fascist military uprising and the civil war, and the province of Burgos is the first to fall into the hands of Franco in his attack on the Republic.
Antoni Benaiges, a unionist and a leftist besides teacher, will be permanently separated from his post as titular teacher in a debugging process to which all education professionals were subjected. Prisoned and tortured in Briviesca, he will eventually be shot and buried in one of the mass graves in La Pedraja in July 1936.
Seventy-six years later, a Catalan photographer returns to the village. Its blacks and whites capture the remains of an abandoned school, the faces of old students, the crumpled pages of the few copies of those still-surviving notebooks. A few kilometers from the village, a team of archeologists and forensics works for the exhumation, one of the common graves in the mountains of La Pedraja.
The path of the photographer, the "portrait painter" seventy years later, also becomes the thread of memory for a documentary on the repression of the masters of the Republic, where the voice of the surviving Bañuelos alumni will finally return the dignity to a past that today is to be buried again.
