Past screening

Bones of Contention

Directed by: Andrea Weiss
Runtime: 1hr 15min Year: 2017

Details

Directed by: Andrea Weiss
Runtime: 1hr 15min Year: 2017
Country: United States, Spain

The ghosts of Spain continue to haunt the present in this moving documentary, which lays bare the searing legacy of Francisco Franco's regime on the LGBT population - including persecuted poet Frederica Lorca.

No one has ever been held to account for the 120,000 victims of Franco’s dictatorship, most of whom are buried in unmarked graves in the Spanish countryside. Andrea Weiss’s searching film explores the complex legacy of the regime, particularly on the homosexuals and transexuals who were criminalised, and lesbians whose voices were silenced.

With Lorca’s haunting poetry as a backdrop, the families of victims – having had to endure years of enforced amnesia – seek to find a way to reconcile with the past by exhuming graves and identifying the bones. But can a country excavate a past that has been so deeply buried?