What Remains
After the exhumation of a mass grave in Spain's southern province of Ciudad Real, two local anthropologists meet Angelita González Yepes, a woman whose family was torn apart by post-war political violence. In the intimate space of her living room, Angelita makes sense and gives meaning to a haunting past that, despite more than seven decades of silence, refuses to pass. The past steadily beats into the present as a survivor and her interlocutors piece together fragmented memories, forensic evidence, and archival documentation. Angelita’s home, her family snapshots, and her defiant voice illustrate the long-term effects of violence. This is what remains.
Film still from What Remains. Angelita’s living room and the photos she keeps.
Film still from What Remains. Tracing kinship, uncovering family histories.
Collaborative Filmmaking.
In contemporary Spain, six feet of dirt and dust separates the past from the present. In more than 2,000 mass graves located in diverse geographic locales across the country, the earth has become a literal and metaphorical boundary between intimate experiences with political violence and victims’ kin ability to publicly narrate these histories. The act of exhumation–the digging up of bones, the retrieval of archival documentation, and the recuperation of family narratives–confronts forgetting and the deep, persistent frontiers that separate victims’ experiences with violence and their ability to speak about them. What Remains explores how the boundaries between past and present–between silence and recognition–are challenged, permeated, and erased through encounters between a survivor and local researchers. As new historical narratives are created in front of the camera, the act of remembering becomes a call to recognize the causes of cultural silence.
This collaborative film made with Spanish visual anthropologist Jorge Moreno Andrés has screened at film festivals in the US, Europe, and Latin America. It is currently distributed by Documentary Educational Resources (DER). For more information, click below.
Article by Jose Durán Rodríguez, published in El Diagonal in summer 2015.
For more information about the film, the directors or the research project “Todos los Nombres” in Ciudad Real, please reach out. A list of film festivals, screenings. and educational materials are available upon request.