“Not Reconciled” is an evocative documentary poem by Jill Daniels.
Belchite, an old medieval town in Aragon in northern Spain, was fought over by Republicans and Nationalists for three weeks at the height of the civil war. When the war ended it was memorialised by Franco to his victory and left it in ruins.
Nobody knows what to do with the ruins, least of all the people who live in the village a few meters away, whose children use the ruins as their playground, men to exercise their horses, young people as a place for sexual explorations and old people to revisit the sites of their old homes.
For most people in the new village, particularly those who remember the war, it is better to forget the past. But the ruins are a constant reminder.
Rosa and Carlos are the imagined ghosts of the ruins, Republican fighters killed in the Spanish civil war and buried in a mass grave near the town.
- Direction: JILL DANIELS (UNIVERSITY OF EAST LONDON)
- Production: JILL DANIELS
