The Silence of Others: A Nation’s Pact of Forgetting and the Endurance of Memory
Abby Ferraro explores how Carracedo and Bahar’s film captures the defiance of survivors in Spain who refuse to let Francoist atrocities be forgotten. Through intimate storytelling and haunting imagery, she argues that the film becomes an act of defiance against a political project built on erasure.
María Martín's roadside memorial for her mother, lost to Francoist violence. "The Silence of Others," 2019.
The Silence of Others begins with a quiet act of remembrance: María Martín, an elderly woman, kneels by the side of a Spanish highway to fasten flowers on the spot where her mother, one of thousands executed under Francisco Franco’s regime, was dumped into a mass grave. It is a haunting image that lingers long after the credits roll. The documentary, directed by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar, is filled with such moments: tender, devastating, and unflinchingly honest.
Filmed over six years, the documentary offers an intimate portrayal of survivors of Franco’s dictatorship as they seek recognition for atrocities that Spain has, officially and legally, chosen to forget. Following Spain’s 1977 Amnesty Law, passed in the name of national reconciliation, no truth commissions were held, nor were trials convened, and only limited and contested reparations were granted. What emerged instead was what many Spaniards call the pacto del olvido, a national silence that has endured for generations.
Carracedo and Bahar do not just document this silence; they confront it. Their vérité-style cinematography, reminiscent of their earlier work Made in L.A., allows the weight of memory to settle into each frame. Viewers meet José María “Chato” Galante, a former political prisoner, who lives with the knowledge that his torturer walks freely, unrepentant and protected by law. The audience returns, again and again, to Martín’s roadside memorial, where grief is offered in flowers because no official marker exists. These moments are rendered not with spectacle, but with patience. The filmmakers permit the silence to speak through unmoving statues, empty landscapes, and faces marked by endurance.
What emerges is a portrait of personal trauma and a quiet indictment of an entire political project built on forgetting. The Silence of Others makes one thing painfully clear: silence is not neutrality but rather a form of violence. The suffering depicted is not only rooted in the past; it transcends the present in the ongoing denial of acknowledgment and the refusal to allow victims even the status of witnesses. And that violence is generational. When young Spaniards are interviewed on the streets of Madrid, their blank expressions and unfamiliarity with the dictatorship’s brutality make the success of the state’s erasure painfully clear.
The documentary is at its most powerful when it contrasts this silence with the sheer persistence of memory. Visual motifs—like the weathered, solemn statues in the Valley of Jerte, suspended in time as survivor testimonies echo in the background—underscore the liminal space these survivors inhabit. Neither fully seen nor wholly forgotten, they remain suspended, waiting for justice that may never come.
And yet, for all its emotional clarity, the film does not fully explore one of its most compelling arguments: the transnational pursuit of justice. The survivors’ appeal to Argentina’s judiciary, in which they filed a lawsuit under the principle of universal jurisdiction to investigate crimes committed during the Franco regime, is rich with historical and legal significance that remains largely unexamined. Argentina’s prosecution of its own military junta in the 1980s—among the first national efforts to hold a former dictatorship accountable for crimes against humanity—lingers in the background when it could have lent critical weight to the film’s narrative. More than a procedural detail, the decision to seek justice in Argentina reflects both a broader Latin American tradition of accountability and the survivors’ strategic engagement with transnational legal avenues.
At the same time, the film gestures at the deep irony that surrounds Spain’s response. Once a champion of universal jurisdiction in its prosecution of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Spain now resists that very principle when confronted with its own past. Legal scholar Ruti Teitel describes universal jurisdiction as a response to the limitations of national courts, a means to prevent political convenience from erasing crimes against humanity. That Spain once wielded this tool in the name of global justice, and has now become the state resisting it, is a staggering reversal. The film acknowledges the contradiction but stops short of fully confronting its implications.
Still, these omissions do not diminish the documentary’s essential achievement. The Silence of Others forces its audience to reckon with the unbearable weight of unacknowledged suffering. For viewers unfamiliar with the scale of Francoist repression, including the inhumane use of mass graves, the means of torture, and the systematic abduction of children, the film educates its audience about a shocking moment in contemporary history that must be confronted. For those who lived through it, it offers something far more precious: a rare moment of public recognition.
Unlike other documentaries that focus on justice attained, such as Judgment at Nuremberg or The Act of Killing, The Silence of Others tells a story of deferred, perhaps altogether denied, justice. There are no courtroom climaxes and no narrative closures, only the slow ache of an unfinished history that seeks reconciliation in vain.
The past does not vanish. It lingers—by roadsides, in stone, in the voices of those who refuse to be silenced. The Silence of Others does not seek to resolve the injustices it exposes, nor does it pretend to. Instead, it asks us to sit with the memories, the voices, and the truths that remain unresolved, to witness what Spain has refused to see. In doing so, the film becomes more than a documentary. It becomes an act of defiance.
Editors
Clara Apt, Managing Editor
Sara Radovic, Copy Editor
Abby Ferraro (she/her) is a first-year MA student in International Relations at NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Science and a copy editor for the Journal of Political Inquiry. She earned her BA in Philosophy and Theology from the University of Oxford, graduating with First-Class Honours and an Exhibition Scholarship. Her academic interests include gender, conflict, and political violence, with a focus on the roles of women in insurgent movements. She is also exploring the relationship between art and political memory, particularly how visual culture shapes narratives of justice and resistance. She has experience in legal research, having worked on litigation strategies and regulatory developments, as well as in policy analysis through nonprofit initiatives focused on climate solutions. Outside of her studies, she enjoys thrifting for hidden gems, dancing enthusiastically (if not always gracefully), lifting weights, and engaging with queer activism.
