Agustí Villaronga's Pa negre (Black Bread) came out as clear winner in this week's Goya award ceremony (the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars). The Catalan film is part of the line-up of the Portland International Film Festival this month. The Hollywood Reporter writes:
Agusti Villaronga's Black Bread won...
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The Courier reports:
Dundee volunteers who travelled to Spain over 70 years ago to fight fascism were commemorated on Saturday. The annual remembrance, organised by the Trades Union Council, was held at the memorial to the International Brigade in Albert Square. Taking part in the event along with union members were relatives...
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The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, together with the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights, has filed two submissions with the successor of Baltasar Garzón at Spain's Audiencia Nacional, who is investigating the accountability of US officials responsible for torture at Guantánamo Bay and other detention sites:
The first...
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Why did George W. Bush not go to Switzerland last week? Xavier Rauscher at International Jurist has the answer: He did not want to end up like Augusto Pinochet. As Geoff Pingree and I wrote in The Nation last May, the pioneering efforts of the Spanish judge "have ensured, for example, that Donald Rumsfeld...
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Opening statement from the US Department of State, from the publication “The Spanish Government and the Axis,” a collection of the wartime correspondence between Franco, Hitler and Mussolini which was discovered in Germany in 1945: THE GOVERNMENTS of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America have exchanged views with regard to...
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BlackPast.org is featuring vignettes of African American volunteers in Spain.
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La voz dormida, the best-selling novel by the late Dulce Chacón about women prisoners in post-Civil War Spain, is being made into a feature film by Benito Zambrano (Solas, Habana Blues), Variety reports; shooting starts this week, featuring Inma Cuesta and María León.
Budgeted at €4 million ($5.5 million),...
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In today's New York Times Book Review, Tara McKelvey reviews The Second Son, Jonathan Rabb’s final volume in a trilogy of historical thrillers, set during the Spanish Civil War:
Fascism and anarchy in 1930s Spain combine with romantic entanglement to provide the action ... The Second Son is an unusual blend...
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The Telegraph reports on one of the revelations in the new documentary about Baltasar Garzón, which is premiering at the Berlinale:
A British based neo-Nazi group allegedly plotted to assassinate one of Spain's leading judges over his attempt to investigate the crimes of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Members of...
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Manchester Confidential highlights the Working Class Movement Library:
There’s lots about the volunteers who went out from Manchester in the 1930s to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War – letters home, and the diary of Ralph Cantor from Cheetham Hill who died in Spain aged 21.
More here.
The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) is an educational non-profit dedicated to promoting social activism and the defense of human rights. ALBA’s work is inspired by the American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Learn more at our website or
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Leon Bibel, a New-York-based painter, printmaker, and teacher who worked with the WPA and was only discovered by the public years after his death in 1995, was primed from birth to identify with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.
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Can conservation be a revolutionary practice? In his new book, The Monument of Tomorrow, Miguel Caballero shows that it certainly can. The story it tells is also the story of the Madrid that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade encountered—and helped shape—during the war.
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Few political leaders of modern Spain have been as maligned as Prime Minister Juan Negrín, who died in exile in 1956. But his personal papers, which have been only open to researchers since 2014, challenge long-standing portrayals of Negrín advanced by anti-Communist critics on both the left and right.
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The war in Spain was barely over, but the scramble to define the legacy of the International Brigades was on. Were they valiant antifascists, or had they been agents, victims, or dupes of world communism? In pre-1945 US popular culture, the brigadistas were often portrayed as heroic antifascists. At the same time, there were...
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China was entangled in multiple local and global crises when this image was published on the back cover of a Shanghai-based magazine.
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The Republic’s fight against fascism was not limited to the trenches. There was also a quieter, though no less vital front—the judiciary—where the Republic fought to preserve legality, due process, and democratic norms.
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Major US films and series about the Spanish Civil War have been few and far between. Why has Hollywood shied away from a topic that, on the face of it, presents such a trove of compelling stories?
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Close to 35 years after serving as a head nurse in the Spanish Civil War, Fredericka Martin, by then an accomplished author, returned to Spain to revisit the hospital sites where she had her fellow volunteers had saved hundreds of lives. Another half century later, Gina Benavidez, a doctoral candidate, followed Martin’s trail.
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Although this text by Ivens is little known—and has never been translated before—it offers an eye-opening reflection on the power of his filmmaking.
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Antifascism has long been synonymous with American values. In 1934, student activists at New York’s City College arguably understood this better than many do today.
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ALBA's project to provide a complete list of the more than 2,800 individuals who left from U.S. territory to fight with the Spanish Republic
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