- July 5th 2023
- Timing: 4 - 6 p.m.
- Location: Building K - Main auditorium Rector Dhanis
Info
- Screening and aftertalk with director Pablo Romero Fresco
- Director: Pablo Romero-Fresco
- Participants: Ian Gibson, Carlos Saura, Mike Dibb, Román Gubern
- Producers: Pablo Romero-Fresco, Xavi Font, Rebordelos, Surtsey Films
- Spain | 2022 | 63 min | cert. PG
- Photography: Martina Trepzcyk
- Editing: Xacio Baño
- Version: audio description and audio subtitles in English
- Audio description: Louise Fryer
- Duration: 61m
Synopsis
Where Memory Ends presents the portrait of the Irish Hispanist and biographer Ian Gibson, a literary detective who has devoted his life to recovering the recent memory of Spain through the biographies of three of its most recognised geniuses: filmmaker Luis Buñuel, painter Salvador Dalí and poet Federico García Lorca. The film takes us through the Residencia de Estudiantes, where all three artists studied together, and Las Hurdes, where Luis Buñuel made his landmark documentary Land without Bread. The journey ends in Granada, where, after a 50-year-long search, Gibson is closer than ever to finding Lorca’s remains in an attempt to bring reconciliation for a country that refuses to make peace with its past and that still has the bodies of over 150,000 Franco’s victims lying in mass graves on the sides of the roads waiting to be given a decent burial.
Director’s note – Alternative audio description
We started shooting the film in 2013 and we only managed to premiere nine years later, in 2023, at both the London Spanish Film Festival and the Seminci, in Spain. After the initial shoot, and having taken a year to edit down the 50 hours of footage into a final one-hour cut in between classes and research at the University of Roehampton in London, where I worked, the edit was stolen from my office. That was the first of many deaths of Where Memory Ends over almost a decade, which involved runaway producers, a pandemic and a change of job and country. But a film about one man’s perseverance and lifetime’s passion cannot be given up. Three years after the edit was stolen, Ian travelled to Granada to present the very last volume of his seminal book on the assassination of Lorca, in one more attempt to find the poet’s remains. We went with him, as the film could only end there, where it all started. He allowed us to use never-seen-before footage of his interview with Lorca’s gravedigger, who located the precise spot of the murdered poet’s unmarked grave –a place where no one has been allowed to dig yet. Ian also showed us his archive, which he calls his own “grave”. Unlike the mass graves where the thousands of people assassinated by the Franco regime lie, Ian’s “grave” is available for anyone who wishes to continue his lifelong dedication to turning individual and subjective memories into collective and objective history. The winding and fascinating road where memory ends and history begins.
For the audio described version of the film, written by Louise Fryer, we decided to adopt a subjective and personal approach. I accompany the viewers by delivering the description as well as insights into the experience of making the film, which are an essential part of the journey shown on screen. The audio description adds an extra layer in the film that was perhaps always meant to be there in the first place. We will be happy to discuss both the film and this approach to audio description in the Q&A after the screening and, above all, we hope you enjoy watching the film as much as we did making it.