Marc Wiese’s This Stolen Country of Mine
Alva Noto (aka Carsten Nicolai) has been awarded the German Documentary Film Music Award 2022 for the original score written for Marc Wiese’s This Stolen Country of Mine. The film shows ‘the dawn of a new world order’: the takeover of an entire country (Ecuador) for ruthless economic exploitation.
Jury statement: “This Stolen Country of Mine explores the disturbingly topical question of a state’s sovereignty in the face of foreign powers. The film portrays Ecuadorian resistance fighters and journalists who oppose the sell-off of a large part of the country’s own resources to Chinese investors.
“Alva Noto’s music subtly lends intense power to the struggle of a mountain village, sensitively and precisely accentuating the film’s disturbing theme – and often bringing us closer than we would like. Close, but never indiscreet, he exposes and holds back when the images and statements of the protagonists speak for themselves. It reflects the dark shadows as well as the budding glimmers of hope of communal resistance.
“We honour the composer’s achievement in fully backing the theme, flanking it with sound collages and nature sounds and underlining the existing drama in a cool, restrained and professional manner.”
The German Documentary Film Music Award is valued at €5000, which is donated by the Versicherungskammer Kulturstiftung and supported by the Förder- und Hilfsfonds des Deutschen Komponistenverbandes.
The 2022 DOK.fest München, running May 4-15, will also shine the spotlight on the ‘diverse realities of Spain’ in its Sol Y Sombra programme, as well as address both trauma and notions of identity in the Franco’s Long Shadow retrospective of six further films.
“Today there are still two Spains,” writes the festival. “On the one hand, since 2019, the far-right Vox party has been in parliament, not afraid to chant slogans like “España – una, grande y libre” (“Spain – one, great and free”), which have not been socially acceptable since Franco’s death. At the same time, Spain is the country with one of the strongest feminist and queer movements in Europe. Large-scale solidarity initiatives like ‘Los Indignados’ (‘the Outraged’) have their home here. Land of sun, land of shadow.” The films in the programme are:
- 918 Nights. 2021, Arantza Santesteban, 65 mins. In 2007, the director is sentenced to prison for her political activism. In the Basque country, this kind of thing is identity-forming, for a lifetime. Details, smells, encounters – time passes her by as if under a magnifying glass. But she doesn’t want to be taken in by it. Rather, she wants to know who she really is.
- Altsasu (That Night). 2021, Marc Parramon Bori and Amets Arzallus Antia, 83 mins. After a bar fight in the early hours of the morning, an off-duty lieutenant of the Guardia Civil is hospitalised with a broken ankle and the night in a bar near Navarra ends with the arrest of two people who are released two days later. In a spectacular media operation, eight young people were arrested and seven of them imprisoned 400 kilometres from their homes.
- El Círculo. 2021, Iván Roiz and Álvaro Priante, 72 mins. In Spain, feminist ideas have captured swathes of society. The machismo that was once so natural is under threat. What is it like to be a man in modern Spanish society? In discussion circles men share their individual experiences with brutal honesty.
- Magaluf Ghost Town. 2021, Miguel Angel Blanca, 80 mins. High season and off season in Magaluf, Mallorca. One million people – Britons for the most part – invade the small town every year. Its inhabitants’ lives are dominated by the ebb and flow of the tides of cheap tourism, between myths and petty crime, dreams and everyday concerns. A morbid, atmospheric look at a local and, at the same time, global phenomenon.
- Sedimentos. 2021, Adrián Silvestre, 89 mins. Five women from I-Vaginarium, a group of transsexual women, spend an intensive week at a hut in an inhospitable mountain landscape. They explore not only the unusual natural landscapes but also their own personalities, search for answers to what unites them and learn to deal with their differences.
The six films in the Franco’s Long Shadow retrospective are testimonies to a trauma that has become a defining part of Spanish identity: the long years of dictatorship under Francisco Franco. “They seek truth in a world of repressed memories and untold past and reveal how much the unresolved history weighs on the democratic present in Spain,” writes the festival. The films are:
- Pico Reja. La verdad que la tierra esconde. 2021, Remedios Malvárez and Arturo Andújar, 92 mins. The failure to search for the victims of the Franco regime is one of the darkest chapters of recent Spanish history. The Pico Reja mass grave in Seville also remained closed until 2020. The opening of the grave encourages relatives and witnesses to talk about their long-suppressed memories of those who were killed.
- Franco on Trial: The Spanish Nuremberg. Spain/Germany. 2018, Lucía Palacios and Dietmar Post, 101 mins. The trial became known as the “Argentine Prosecution”, in which a judge from Buenos Aires issued several international arrest warrants against high-ranking representatives of the Franco dictatorship in 2010. Due to the “Pact of Forgetting”, all perpetrators have so far remained at large. The film accompanies the efforts to finally bring them to justice.
- Franco’s Promise. France/Spain 2014, Marc Weymuller, 123 mins. Belchite was battle-hardened in the civil war and Franco himself promised to build “a beautiful and spacious new city as a reward for heroism never seen before.” The old Belchite could have been rebuilt – it wasn’t that broken. But something else was at stake: the erasure of reality – the result: amnesia.
- El año del descubrimiento. Spain/Switzerland 2020, Luis López Carrasco, 200 mins. Spain, 1992 – the year of superlatives. Not yet 10 years in the EU and already the big party: the Olympics in Barcelona, Expo in Seville and the 500-year celebration since the “discovery” of America. In Cartagena, however, the industrial change is decided in the shadow of the golden year, the mood is explosive, and in the pub we get to know them, those who are “the people”.
- Morir en Madrid. 1963, Frédéric Rossif, 85 mins. In archive images, the film episodically sketches a chronicle of the civil war (1936-1939) and the following dictatorship of the Franco regime; the defence of Madrid, the bombing of Guernica, the international brigades and the death of Federico García Lorca.
- El desencanto. 1976, Jaime Chávarri, 97 mins. The portrait of the bereaved family of the poet and friend of Franco, Leopoldo Panero, who died in 1962, becomes a grotesque symbol of the decline and decadence of the Spanish upper class at the end of the dictatorship and, quite incidentally, dismantles the Francoist image of society and the family.
