TODO ES CÁRCEL         

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Letters from an inner exile

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Directed by: Eloy Enciso
Script: Eloy Enciso
Photography: Jimmy Gimferrer
Editing: Lisa María Velázquez
Sound: Marisol Cao
Cast: Elsa Pereira
Production: Filmika Galaika, Umbracle Cinema

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A photographer’s journey between past and present, as she develops a project on the concentration camps of the Spanish dictatorship, gradually reveals a cartography of the defeated.
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“In the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and throughout the early years of Franco’s dictatorship, dozens of concentration camps became instruments for the repression and liquidation of Republican forces. In the name of family peace and national reconciliation, the reality of the Francoist camps has remained erased from public consciousness, ignored even by Spanish cinema. Eloy Enciso confronts this collective amnesia, not by adopting the familiar forms of historical investigation or documentary memorialisation, but by mobilising the powers of fiction to rethink cinema’s encounter with history, memory and oblivion.

The work of investigation is entrusted to the film’s protagonist. Elsa, a Spanish artist based in Berlin, is travelling through Spain scouting locations for a future documentary film on Franco’s camps. The death of an elderly uncle draws her back to the family estate, where her research becomes entangled with questions of kinship, inheritance and transmission. Interwoven with Elsa’s present-day journey is the tragic story of Carmen and Ángel, lovers torn apart by the defeat of 1939 and interned in the victors’ camps. Enciso and his co-writer have imagined for them a sequence of extraordinary prison letters, in which the experience of violence and survival unfolds alongside a lucid meditation on defeat. Early in the film, a young woman reads one of Carmen’s letters into Elsa’s camera. Behind her, a luxury yacht leaves the harbour of Alicante, close to the beach where the young Republican, stranded with thousands of others while waiting for a ship that would never come, had written those very words. Later, carried in voice-over by the lovers of 1939 over images of contemporary Spain, the letters dissolve into a shared interior monologue, as the spectral time of the camps overlays the present.

Everything is prison. A cinema, a convent, an almond grove: for the fascists of 1939, any place could become a site of internment; in a society that refuses to acknowledge or narrate its own history—national and familial alike—any place may become one again. The film’s true subject is therefore not the camps themselves, nor even their past existence, but the void they have left behind: the disappearance of their traces from the landscape, the indifference of Spanish consciousness. Todo es cárcel gives form to a negative memory. What it summons cannot be seen, touched or heard. Its extraordinary visual and sonic richness, frame after frame, exists only as the ground—or the negative—of what remains withdrawn, awaiting recognition.” (Cyril Neyrat)