To dig into the truth. Literally and metaphorically.
At the individual and at the collective level.
Bodies pregnant with legacies—tender or violent.
A gestation process, and a painful delivery.
Dealing with the aftermath.
The opening sequence:
Taking pictures, trying to capture life in a snapshot. To hold still what is moving. To record and remember. The lines of a face, the sparkle of a gaze, the light of a smile.
Pictures of the past and of the present.
Pictures as tokens of History and its lieux de memoire.
Revisiting the pictures, revisiting History.
Shots of commodities sometimes replace photographs of people. Objects too, have a life of their own and bespeak other historical processes.
The toy that was buried is unearthed and can circulate again between generations. In its proper place. In the proper hands.
Bodies hijacked by death in the midst of their activities. The volcano of Civil War has buried them beneath its fatal ashes.
Life holds still, like the memories that provide the only guiding thread back to them.
The archeological work of digging up oblivion and erasure. The emotional work of processing the unearthed artifacts.
To confront and articulate historical and personal memory without ignoring what meets the eye. First and after.
The legitimacy given by science sometimes helps.
The body does not lie.
Genetic evidence, or bones in the earth. The veracity of facts can no longer be denied.
Some cognitive coherence and emotional alignment for Janis. If your passion is to bring to light what is, then you start with your own life. Even if it takes time. Janis’s journey inscribes itself in the national journey.
It takes time to restore what has been broken, stolen, damaged.
But truth makes you free.
Telling a story or inheriting one: trying to patch together lose narrative threads on the twin loom of memory and the imagination.
Love in its many faces and guises.
Love that comes and goes.
And returns, uninvited, to haunt scripts of domesticity and normativity.
The final shot:
Cecilia the truth-inspirer is looking down on the historical legacy that awaits her.
A new Spain, perhaps, where the past can be laid to rest, where survivors can mourn their loved ones, and where filiations can be revisited.
it is as if, under little the little girl’s gaze, artifacts of the past retrieved their human form: a palimpsest of humanity that only love can see—defeating, if for an instant, the legacy of hatred.
Marie LIENARD-YETERIAN