GERMANY has made atonement a pillar of national life. Austria has its Holocaust monument and wrestles with admitting to its past sins, and an undercurrent of fury about the extent and sheer evil of wartime collaboration continues to rumble in France.
But in Spain, where fascist dictatorship seemed to give way to democracy with barely a ripple of contention, the past has remained decently buried. Who wants to remember being a fascist? By general consensus, Spain has concentrated on looking forward.
Clearly, this has paid off. In the three decades since the dictator General Franco died, Spain has been transformed from a poor backwater into a sophisticated match for any of its European neighbours, the smart Spain of Almodovar movies, Zara clothes and 24-hour clubbing. Many military leaders, police and civil servants survived the old regime to serve the new, but they are all democrats now, after all. Even the cinema, says Manuel Huerga, has preferred to leave the past alone.
In his new film Salvador, Huerga has begun the inevitable process of facing that past down. The film, which screened in Cannes last year and has since been multiply honoured in Europe, is set in 1974. The Salvador of the title was a young Catalan anarchist who was one of the last political prisoners executed under Franco.
Ambushed with a few of his friends, Salvador Puig Antich had shot out at random and hit one of the police. In an atmosphere steamy with incipient revolt, there was no way his sentence could be commuted, despite international protests. His death was supposed to sound a terrible warning.
It didn't work, of course. By Huerga's account, Salvador's imprisonment, the fruitless appeals by his lawyers and final garrotting were to become the focus of a growing swell of opposition to Franco's regime that, by the time he was killed, was beyond any kind of containment.
There was widespread rioting at the news of his death, and thousands of people who would never have dreamt of throwing a petrol bomb attended funeral services. The tide had turned.
After 30 years, says Huerga, it was time to tell this story.
"The transition - a peaceful change from a fascist system to a modern democracy - has been an example to the international community," he says. "I think we have done well. But 40 years of Franco in power created several generations that thought like Franco; there is a 'sociological Francoism' in Spain still, even now."
Salvador is played by the German actor Daniel Bruehl - the star of Goodbye Lenin! and The Edukators. Bruehl was born in Barcelona to a Catalan mother. He had to learn his Catalan lines with a voice coach because his mother spoke only Spanish at home. Her father supported Franco, and for him all regional cultures were an affront to Spanish nationalism. As the film effectively shows, nothing is beyond censure under tyranny.
Bruehl remembers going for summer holidays to his mother's village as a child. The constitutional monarchy was well established, but the village was still split down the middle by politics.
"There are 500 people there and 250 of them don't talk to the other 250," he says. "The fascists go to one bar and the socialists go to the other; there are families who have hated each other for generations. The civil war is still in people's heads; you can feel it."
At the same time, says Huerga, the silence around the subject means that, already, many young people don't know what happened.
"Twelve-year-old kids don't know who Franco was and that is more scary to me. It is crucial not to forget that history. In Spain it is commonly said that 'Oh, Franco, yes, he wasn't so bad'. Well, one year before he died he sentenced to death some young people whose only crime was to disagree with the regime; they were handing out leaflets. Two months before he died, he was still signing death warrants. In 40 years he killed thousands of people and made thousands more political prisoners. So how can anyone think he was a good man?"
Huerga made this film in collaboration with Salvador's four sisters, who want their brother's case reopened and the records of his trial - a court martial held in camera - made public. They read and approved the script, which includes many glimpses of a warm and supportive family life.
But the film is never sentimental; it does not set out to jerk tears or make the audience cringe with blood or brutality. Even in the depiction of Salvador's death, an appalling business involving a hand-turned mechanical garrotte, the narrative remains as cool and steadfast as its hero proved to be when he faced his executioners.
But it does convey a real sense of humanity. Salvador was only 25 when he died. He is depicted as an idealist, rebel and romantic - a creature of the '70s who liked sex, drugs and rock'n'roll at least as much as he did revolution.
In one of the film's most poignant scenes, heart-wrenching in its truthfulness, he and his mates break up laughing in the middle of a bank robbery, hardly able to hold their guns up as they giggle.
The straight-guy tellers, up against the wall, stare at these freaks in astonishment. Really, the only difference between Salvador and millions of other European students was that he was fighting an establishment keen to fight back.
There is substantial official resistance, Huerga says, to opening any of those cases again lest the can of worms prove bottomless. "There were so many victims of Franco. There is controversy about whether it is opportune."
Of course, it runs against the interests of many of those in power to hold the past up to the light. Huerga began work on this film under the premiership of prime minister Jose Maria Aznar, the most right-wing Spanish leader since Franco. He was defeated at the polls in 2004 largely because of his support for the Iraq invasion.
"You know in Spain we have some problems of nationalities; in Catalonia and the Basque country and so on. I was very interested to start the project while Aznar was there."
The film, Huerga says, sticks closely to the facts and sequence of Salvador's life. Still, he clearly sees his film as more than historical record. It is a clarion call.
"Things have not changed too much from that time," he says. "We are very happy with our democracy - and not just in Spain; that we live in a world with democracies, that we have many types of freedom from authority, that we have the internet, that homosexual marriage is legal. Probably we live in an artificial, silly happiness.
"But, at the same time, there are people like Bush and Berlusconi who make this world very dangerous. And those guys, the people at that time I think were very courageous to fight against the regime. At that time, the enemy was very clear. Now it is not so clear; the enemy is around us. And I don't find too many people fighting now."
Salvador screens at the inaugural La Mirada, Jewels of Spanish Cinema festival, which runs from March 1-11 at the Australian Centre of the Moving Image.
Spanning contemporary Spanish film, documentaries and short films, the program is curated by Rocio Garcia.
A festival highlight, titled Almodovar Presents, shows classic Spanish cinema programmed by Pedro Almodovar. www.lamirada.org.au
http://www.theage.com.au/news/film/anarchist-versus-a-forgotten-foe/ 2007/02/22/1171733899024.html?page= fullpage#contentSwap2
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