This Spanish historical drama directed by Patricia Font was a recommendation by a dear friend and it was only one session a day so I’m sure it will disappear from cinemas soon.

It tells the story of a young woman Ari (Laia Costa) in contemporary Barcelona who becomes caught up in a search for her grandfather‘s history. Carlos (Felipe Garcia Velez) is in a nursing home, rather gloriously perched on a cliff looking out over the sea. We don’t know a lot about Ari, only that she is on sick leave from work and has a fractious relationship with her mother. When she finds that a recently unearthed mass grave may contain the bones of her grandfather’s father, she sets off to find out more.

We spend most of our time back in 1936 in a small village when newly arrived school teacher Antonio (Enric Auquer) is trying to settle into a new ramshackle school. We know it is a time of political change, with the Republic of Spain having been declared and many left-wing people believing that it will finally mean a separation of church and state and a celebration of progress and learning, not knowing of the impending Civil War that will cost so many lives

Antonio is one of these people, and he has an unconventional approach to schooling. he encourages the children to explore their ideas and stories and to use a small printing press to make books. When he discovers that none of the children have ever seen the sea, they produce a book that is full of stories of how the children imagine it to be even though they have never seen it.

A political friend of Antonio asks if he will foster the son of another friend, Bernado (Carlos Troya) who is in prison, and this son is Ari’s grandfather Carlos. Young Carlos (Gael Aparicio) has been moved from family to family and has begun to start acting out. Antonio of course takes him on and we know he will be the perfect solution to Carlos’s detachment from love and care.

We slowly see how Antonio‘s uncomplicated compassion and respect for the children helps them become more respectful to each other, to have greater faith in themselves and even shifts the support of their parents towards his encouragement of their children’s growth and learning. He is an atheist though and this doesn’t go down well with Father Primitivo (Milo Taboada) or the more politically constrained mayor.

We already know it’s not going to end well because we know of the mass graves and this lends poignancy to every scene. There is no doubting the emotional impact of the film and it’s place within the narrative of history in countries like Spain that suffered from authoritarian regimes and Civil War. This is emphasised when we see in the end credits that this is based on a real person and copies of the books still exist.

I’m not so sure that the framing of the story within the contemporary experience of Ari was completely successful. You were never really sure of who she is or what motivates her – in a way she is just a representation of us as viewers of the past. Her grandfather Carlos similarly is symbolic, I feel, with the final scene and his view of the sea underlined in a way that makes it hard to escape it’s emotional intentions.

This may sound critical, but I think in general this is a broadly appealing film that gives us the opportunity to understand the kind of atrocities that are still playing out today and see ourselves within that historical context. Would be the ones who survive by keeping our heads down? Or would we risk everything in order to speak the truth?