Marjorie Baumgarten sees the award-winning new film at FantasticFest:
Amid an epic love story, the film also functions as a parable about the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship, themes that are practically a subgenre of the Spanish cinema. Beginning in 1937, the film opens with a preamble...
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An article and television report by Stephanie Simon for New York 1 (2-min. video can be viewed here):
"We opened up the boxes, you know, didn't know what to expect. And in fact, there were about 165 rolls of nitrate film, which is highly flammable and combustible. But there...
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Iskra1916 reports on the commemoration of Socialist Spanish Civil War volunteers from Belfast:
the Republican Socialist ex-prisoners group, Teach Na Failte and the Lower Castlereagh Community Development Group, in conjunction with the Consensus Programme, met today for a tour of
"Activist judges like Garzón, Andreu, and Pedraz have created a big diplomatic headache for the Zapatero government." An overview of this past two years' developments at Project Censored: Media Democracy in Action:
In October 2009, under great pressure from the United States, the government of Spain decided to limit its own...
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A feature in Fabulous magazine on women war journalists, including Martha Gellhorn:
Described by her biographer as a woman who "smoked, drank and travelled with abandon" and used sex to get the best stories, American Martha Gellhorn had an epic career spanning 60 years. She wrote of the human suffering...
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Marlene Sidaway from the International Brigade Memorial Trust writes with sad news (listen to Sam here):
We are very sorry to have to tell you that our much loved and respected Chairman, SAM LESSER (RUSSELL), has died at the age of 95.
Sam was a founding-member...
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From our friend Manus O'Riordan: On 29 September 2010, TG4--the Irish language TV station--showed (with English language subtitles) a new documentary on the Irish Socialist Republican leader James Connolly, who was the inspiration for the 15th International Brigade’s Connolly Column. Manus is interviewed briefly in the 10th minute of Part 1. This documentary will remain accessible...
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With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain, an 18-minute silent film by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herbert Kline that was recently discovered in the ALBA archives (clip here) and is now on display at the International Center of Photography, will be screened on October 23 at 1:30pm as part of MoMA's...
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Impunity Watch at Syracuse University reports:
A representative from Spain told the UN Human Rights Council on Tuesday that they would not be investigating alleged war crimes committed during the Francisco Franco dictatorship in accordance with an amnesty law passed by the Spanish government in 1977. Mexico had called on...
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La Colonia: Spanish Immigrants in New York, 1898-1945, the stunning photography exhibit curated by ALBA Board member James D. Fernández and co-sponsored by ALBA, which has been on show for a little over a week now at NYU's King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, is generating a lot of media buzz in Spain,...
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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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What Was a Young Dutch Pilot Doing in Civil-War Spain? Saturday, March 20, 1937. Farmers at work in a vineyard near Narbonne, in southern France, see a Dutch plane circling for hours. At four in the afternoon, a car arrives whose driver unfolds a white sheet. At this signal, the plane lands on a...
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Carmelo Delgado, a Puerto Rican law student in Madrid, fought as a militiaman on the Republican side until he was taken prisoner by the rebel forces and shot. Can his remains be recovered? In their moving graphic novel El abismo del olvido, which deals with the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Paco Roca...
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As Patricia Schechter dug into her family’s history, she uncovered one of the untold stories of the Spanish labor movement: an Andalusian strike in early 1936 grounded in a rich legacy of disciplined pacifism and sturdy worker cooperatives. After the July 1936 military uprising that unleashed the Spanish Civil War, hundreds of men from...
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Vince Lossowski (1913-1984), who was born and raised in Rochester, New York, in a Polish working-class family, served with the International Brigades from August 1937 until September 1938. In 1942, he was recruited for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), along with half a dozen of his fellow Lincoln Brigade vets. During World War...
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The roots of fascism lay right here in the United States. In fact, anti-Blackness is a persistent feature of fascism in all its forms. But there is a long lineage of Black antifascists that still have things to teach us. When the House Un-American Activities Committee was first created, in May 1938, its chair,...
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Despite their name, the famous International Brigades of Spain’s Republican Army included thousands of Spanish soldiers who served alongside the foreign volunteers. Among them was César Orquín, an anarchist from Valencia who served as a commissar in the Lincoln Battalion. Details of his extraordinary life, long shrouded in mystery and scandal, have recently come...
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Over the many years I spent researching the presence of the International Brigades in the town of Vic and its surroundings, in northern Catalonia, I’d always been curious about the case of Simon Bulka, a medical captain, and his wife, the nurse Chrissie Wallace, both from Scotland, who were assigned to the International Hospital...
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The lives of Ruth and Haya Meites, two sisters who left Jewish Palestine in order to help Republican Spain in its struggle against fascism, illustrate the level of international women’s participation in the Spanish Civil War—and its limits.
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“Oh, you were a premature antifascist,” the chair of the Yale Classics department replied to Bernard Knox when, during a job interview in 1946, Knox told him about his stint with the International Brigades preceding his US army service during World War II. “I was taken aback,” Knox wrote later. “If you were not...
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Contemporary Spanish photographers are finding new ways to return to the memory of the Civil War, departing from the sober documentary approach that was dominant until recently.
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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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