June Program June 24–27, 2010

İstanbul Modern Cinema presents a program that uncovers a hidden part of Spanish cinema. The featuring films, all Turkey premieres, focus on a generation of independent filmmakers whose innate unwillingness to conform with facist Franco’s regime forced them to produce, distribute, and exhibit radical films in Catalonia. Connected with workers' movements and political parties, these authors put their images in the service of anti-Franco causes, and even managed to organize a distribution network through cinema clubs, universities, social and cultural associations, and even parochial schools. Many of these films have no credits, in order to protect the identities of its participants. While this body of work represents a margin of Spanish film history, it nevertheless contains some of the most crucial, first-hand documents of the end of the dictatorship, revealing problems of housing and social services, immigration, the fate of political prisoners, and restrictions on expression and free speech. These filmmakers, members of the first generation who didn’t fight the Civil War, also chronicled the ongoing psychological, social, economic, and cultural effects of the regime. Forced to choose between exile and intellectual annihilation, they instead expressed themselves, putting their art in the service of a political movement that altered the course of Spanish history.

All Films are in Spanish with English and Turkish subtitles. Most of these films will be shown in digital formats, due to the difficulties of preserving them on their original formats.