Zensurversuch "Die Siedler Francos" / Attempted censorship
At the second largest Spanish International Film Festival in Valladolid there was an attempt to stop the two screenings of the film "Franco's Settlers". A threatening letter had been sent by the son of one of the protagonists interviewed in the film. Various Spanish newspapers and German radio have reported on the incident. The reaction of the festival director, surprisingly was to sweep the attempted censorship under the carpet. The posters of the film were not put up at the movie theater. All movie posters, including one that showed Hitler and a huge swastika (looking for sensation and a scandal) were prominent but not the one that showed the Spanish dictator in a satirical manner. The filmmakers would have liked to make this incident public in solidarity with the festival but the festival director's reaction was to silence everything and to reject openly defending one of the main democratic values, freedom of speech. This reaction shows that there is an on-going fear to address the dictatorial and fascist past. You can put Hitler (Hitler sells) up on a wall but you are not allowed to put up Franco. You can make gore movies about the Indonesian dictatorship (The Act of Killing) but if you make a movie that in its aesthetic and content is the opposite of sensational and in which the defenders and opponents of/to the Franco dictatorship are given a chance to expose, in a pluralistic way, their ideas then you are facing a sort of double attempt of censorship.
Infos zum Film gibt es hier:
playloud.org/francossettlers.html
facebook.com/loscolonosdelcaudillo