The Room Next Door

 

Director Pedro Almodóvar

Almodóvar winning the Golden Lion at Venice

The director on the set

Almodóvar with his two actresses

THE ROOM NEXT DOOR               B+                                                                                      Spain  USA  France  (107 mi)  2024  ‘Scope  d: Pedro Almodóvar

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window.  It had begun to snow again.  He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight.  The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward.  Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.  It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.  It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.  It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns.  His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

—James Joyce The Dead, last short story from Dubliners, 1914, The Dead by James Joyce

This is the kind of thing that people in their 20’s will probably find turgid and endlessly insufferable, but people over 50 will find much more insightful, as it deals with the latter stages of life instead of the early years, a common subject of interest as people mature.  Think of final films by Ingmar Bergman with SARABAND (2003), Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (Offret) (1986), or Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011), but also Leo McCarey’s MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW (1937), Vittorio de Sica’s UMBERTO D (1952), Akira Kurosawa’s IKIRU (1952), Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari) (1953), Cynthia Scott’s Strangers in Good Company (Le Fabuleux gang des sept) (1990), David Lynch’s THE STRAIGHT STORY (1999), Isabel Coixet’s My Life Without Me (2003), Sarah Polley’s Away from Her (2006), Michael Haneke’s Amour (Love) (2012), and Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie (2015).  Death is an ominous subject for anyone to approach, at any age, yet when you’re young, it’s just not something you think about unless you have to, like near fatal accidents or illnesses, or having to attend funerals.  Pedro Almodóvar is not a director one would associate with aging or death, as his bad boy charisma and youthful energy are seemingly boundless, yet he was inspired by the 2020 novel What Are You Going Through by American writer Sigrid Nunez, and while it’s about a woman accompanying a terminally ill friend through her last months, offering many existential questions about impermanence and death, what stands out is the book’s conversation-heavy structure.  In this regard, the filmmaker was required to find two actresses who fit the mold, who could speak calmly and quietly through a stream of personal and mostly secluded conversations that capture our attention by exploring nothing less than the realities of living and dying in this world and how we feel about both.  We don’t often see these probing in-depth discussions on death and dying when it comes to adult friendships, revealing hidden truths we often shy away from, but Almodóvar directly faces several taboos of society such as the illegality of euthanasia or assisted suicide in forty out of fifty states in America, with only two states making it legal for non-residents, where his emotional connection to this forbidden terrain is undeniable, allowing the personal and political to intersect, expressed without a trace of sentimentality.  Spain legalized euthanasia in 2021 and is one of only 11 countries in which any form of assisted dying is legal.  In Great Britain, assisted suicide is punishable by up to 14 years’ imprisonment, while euthanasia is regarded as either manslaughter or murder, where the maximum penalty is life imprisonment.  Choosing two New York-based writers, Ingrid (Julianne Moore, who won a Best Actress Academy Award for Still Alice in 2015), a successful autofiction novelist, reconnects with a lifelong friend Martha (Tilda Swinton, who won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for MICHAEL CLAYTON in 2008), a hard-nosed war reporter, who is in the final stages of cervical cancer, THE ROOM NEXT DOOR | Official Clip YouTube (32 seconds).  Very few filmmakers, especially those who are male, have consistently captured the inner lives of women and the actresses playing them like Almodóvar, whose earlier film ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (1999) was an affecting ode to the female spirit, dedicated “To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider…To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to men who act and become women, to all people who want to become mothers.  To my mother.”  In keeping with the novel, Almodóvar chose to make his first English-language feature, having made two earlier shorts in English, one of them starring Tilda Swinton, now channeling his inner Douglas Sirk in the brightly colored costumes and set designs, where you literally feel like you’re walking back in time directly into a Douglas Sirk film, and since Julianne Moore was already in Todd Haynes’ FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002), an homage to Sirk films from the 50’s like All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written On the Wind (1956), and Imitation of Life (1959), that’s not entirely unexpected, yet everything that we’ve come to appreciate about Almodóvar is on display here, where a heightened sense of artifice has always been present in his work.

The leading light of contemporary Spanish cinema, Almodóvar’s characteristic splashes of vibrant color and bold melodramatic flourishes are everpresent at every turn, though this feels more tightly compressed due to the severity of the subject matter, adopting a more introspective and sober tone, as the weight of mortality is carried on both of their shoulders, told with a biting wit and a bold intellectual curiosity, along with an appreciation for an empathetic ear, adopting a very literary feel, while also including a screening of Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954).  Both actresses, by the way, have a history of working front and center for extraordinary queer filmmakers, Julianne Moore with Todd Haynes, and Tilda Swinton first with Derek Jarman and then with Luca Guadagnino and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, so their choice to grace the screen feels appropriate.  Winner of the Golden Lion (1st place) at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, with Almodóvar acknowledging in his acceptance speech, “As directors, we are privileged to be the first witness when a miracle occurs in front of the camera,” this is a film that examines mortality through the lens of human frailty, as we have two women who couldn’t be more different.  A caring and compassionate woman, Ingrid responds to a reader at a heavily populated book signing in Manhattan’s Rizzoli Bookstore, with the reader questioning whether writing the book changed her perceptions, “In the prologue, you say you wrote this book in order to better understand and accept death,” to which she responds that she’s still afraid of death, “It feels unnatural to me.  I can’t accept that something alive has to die.”  It’s only through these readers that Ingrid learns Martha is seriously ill in a nearby hospital, as the two haven’t spoken to each other in years, losing contact after Ingrid moved to Paris for a few years, though they worked together for Paper magazine in the 80’s, during the “party girl” phases of their lives, sharing, at different times, the same sexually volcanic boyfriend (John Turturro, who appears later with Ingrid, actually quoting a line from Almodóvar’s 1988 film WOMAN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN), and may have even been lovers, but that didn’t last, yet they’ve remained lifelong friends.  The visit in the hospital is heartening, as she’s clearly welcomed, but Martha informs her, “I swing between euphoria and depression,” concluding “Survival feels almost disappointing.”  Something of a force of nature, fiercely independent and bluntly direct, hard and self-centered by nature, exhibiting no signs of self-pity, having a complicated and distant relationship with her only daughter Michelle (also played by Swinton), though with all the chemotherapy drugs filtering through her system, still lingering long afterwards, she doesn’t have the same mental sharpness, becoming more forgetful, losing focus, where the blend between reality and dreams is intermixed, causing extreme internal anguish, “I’ve been reduced to very little of myself.”  Yet our eye can’t help looking out the window at this enormous, picture-perfect New York City skyline, impeccably framed, exquisitely shot by Eduard Grau, where you wonder what it costs to be in a place like that, as it’s like no hospital room we have ever seen, where it’s idyllic in so many ways, with freshly cut flowers by the bedside, but then the crushing reality hits like a ton of bricks with the real reason why she’s there.  It’s just so Sirkian, a women’s drama with melodramatic hysteria reduced to minimalist theater, never depressing with all the eye-popping color, with occasional moments of unexpected humor.  Death is an unseen character in this suffocatingly embalmed chamber drama, as its ghostly presence is always hovering nearby, where both women have a fragile relationship with death that evolves over time, yet the core of their humanity is everpresent, a shining light continually elevating the material from the shadows.  The other aspect of the film is the intense, non-stop musical score by Alberto Iglesias, who has composed the music of every single Almodóvar feature since THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET (1995), where the sensuously provocative music is often the core of the films, most especially TALK TO HER (2002), with a remastered 12-CD edition of those compositions released in 2020, as the music literally plays throughout the entire film, except for a few moments near the end, so the entire composition is about as long as a Mahler symphony.           

Perhaps the most intriguing elements of the film are the artistic references, so while the film is essentially about dying, and doing so on your own terms, it’s also about the living, where these references are bridges from the past to the present and even into the future.  As the two of them head out of town into upstate New York around Woodstock (actually shot at Casa Szoke in the mountains just outside Madrid, Szoke House: The 'Silent' Hero of Almodóvar's Film), Martha has chosen a state-of-the-art residence to rent for a month, literally immersed in nature, deep in the woods in an idyllic, dream-like location where glass walls make the inside and outside merge, THE ROOM NEXT DOOR | Official Clip YouTube (34 seconds), with designs to end it all in a completely unorthodox manner, one that challenges the right of the living to take their own lives, especially under these terms, as all Martha has to expect is an excruciatingly slow and painful decline, so she constructs her own timeline, which may, in fact, be illegal.  Viewers are also aware that, starting at least with the powerfully autobiographical Pain and Glory (Dolor y Gloria) (2019), followed by the equally compelling Parallel Mothers (Madres paralelas) (2021), arguably his most political work that unearths ghosts of the past, Almodóvar himself has been wrestling with his own mortality.  Without getting into the specifics (“You can find almost anything on the dark web”), let’s just say that it’s a perplexing moral dilemma that continues to haunt the living, especially bypassing the authority of religion and law enforcement.  And while they bide their time, they renew their friendship through some of the most intimately revealing observations, none more prominent than Martha’s word-for-word remembrance of the final words in the James Joyce short story The Dead, a monument of literature that was also made into a stellar movie by John Huston in 1987, working from a wheelchair while hooked up to an oxygen tank (Huston didn’t live to see his final film, released several months after his death), directing his own daughter Angelica Huston, yet what’s so memorable about that film is the unforgettable ending, where the poetic power of the words mix so perfectly with the sublime imagery of quietly falling snow, The Dead (1987) End Monologue YouTube (4:18).  And they watch a DVD of the film one night, after spending the entire night viewing the hilarious Buster Keaton comedy SEVEN CHANCES (1925) and the melodramatic tale of doomed love in Max Ophüls’ LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN (1948), finally ending with the Huston film at sunrise just as a new day is about to begin, an apt metaphor.  The Nunez book is filled with plenty of references to other literary and artistic works, but Almodóvar chooses his own distinct set of references that are not in the book, and they are each rife with meaning and context, like a window into the souls of these complex women.  Ingrid tells Martha that she is planning a book on Dora Carrington (who is mentioned in the book, but Almodóvar invents a different conversation), a painter affiliated with the Bloomsbury Group that included novelist Virginia Woolf, openly bisexual and known for her many love affairs, who agreed to marry Ralph Partridge, not for love but to secure the 3-way relationship, as she was obsessed by the unrequited love from gay writer Lytton Strachey, becoming distraught by his death from cancer, dying by suicide two months later at age 38.  While there are visual references of Edward Hopper’s paintings, most notably People in the Sun | Smithsonian American Art Museum, by the end, the glamor element for Martha is right out of a magazine photoshoot, where there’s even a cinematic reference to the red lipstick sequence in Powell and Pressburger’s BLACK NARCISSUS (1947) (Sequence Analysis “Lipstick” in Black Narcissus), and, of course, there’s an inevitable shot that mirrors Bergman’s Persona (1966), where after death there’s a symbolic transference of identity that resembles a rebirth, with Ingrid inheriting Martha’s strength and fortitude, as she is literally transformed by the experience.  Almodóvar adds his own spin on it in the final memorable frames as once again the snow drifts down, with the filmmaker utilizing Joyce as the narrator of his own haunting elegy.  

Parallel Mothers (Madres paralelas)

 

Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s Il Quarto Stato, 1901

Writer/director/producer Pedro Almodóvar

Almodóvar with Penélope Cruz

Almodóvar with Milena Smit and Penélope Cruz

Valley of the Fallen

 

 

 

PARALLEL MOTHERS (Madres paralelas)       B                                                                      Spain  France (123 mi)  2021  d: Pedro Almodóvar

No history is mute.  However much they burn it, however much they smash it, however much they lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth.                                                           — innertitle seen at the end of the film from Uruguayan essayist, journalist, historian, and social activist Eduardo Galeano’s collection of essays, Patas Arriba: Escuela del Mundo al Revés (Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World), 1998

Almodóvar has avoided references to Franco throughout his career, making films that are mostly non-political, though he emerged as part of La Movida Madrileña, an underground, counterculture artistic movement taking place in Madrid after the death of Franco in 1975, mixing alternative theater, punk rock, and porn ("'Bless the chaos': La Movida Madrileña, Spain's seedy, wild post-Franco underground") in an attempt to break free of the Franco-imposed state of exception, a fascist state aligned with the Catholic Church that brutally restricted civil liberties and freedom of expression.  In his 1997 film LIVE FLESH, the first to feature a young Penélope Cruz (appearing onscreen for all of 8-minutes), she plays a young mother giving birth at Christmas on a bus in the middle of the night in Madrid, set during the Franco-era state of emergency of 1970, as she goes into labor (giving birth to the film’s protagonist), graffiti on the wall can be seen that reads “Libertad, Abajo el estado de escepción!/Liberty, down with the state of exception!”  Almodóvar’s early work particularly emphasized social and sexual freedoms, taking satiric shots at the Catholic Church, basically violating every known taboo, largely viewed as a response to break free of the Franco-era of repression.  While Almodóvar is the most famous filmmaker of La Movida, blending fast-paced comedic farce into classic melodrama mixed with film noir, his films amplified the exhilaration of the transition to democracy that followed Franco’s death, though they largely tend to be viewed as apolitical.  Not so here, as this is an intentional reminder of history, the film that most directly addresses the topic of historical memory, taking on the horrifying legacy of Franco’s Spain, a fascist dictatorship that officially lasted from 1939 until 1975, responsible for those “disappeared” citizens who were forcibly abducted, tortured, and murdered by paramilitary forces, subject to mass burial in unmarked graves of anywhere up to 150,000 civilians.  As many as a million more passed through concentration camps built during the 40’s, with many dying of malnutrition and starvation.  Another half-million fled Spain as political refugees.  Over the next four decades of Franco’s rule, thousands were arrested, tortured or murdered by the secret police, while strikes, political parties, and trade unions were banned, and democratic rights suppressed.  The aftermath of Franco’s death was followed by a pacto del olvido, or pact of forgetting, a 1977 Amnesty Law that secured the release of all political prisoners, yet the political parties decided that the best way of transitioning past the dictatorship into a democracy was to “forget” about recent atrocities, allowing time for memories and eyewitnesses to die, as there would be no prosecutions for war crimes or human rights violations, an unwritten agreement that stayed in place until the first mass grave was dug up in 2000.  While it’s impossible to know exactly, as many of these mass graves no longer exist because they have been dug up without anyone knowing or because freeways, industrial parks, and new neighborhoods have been built over them, yet reportedly 90,000 missing Spaniards were shot during the 1936-39 civil war and dumped in unidentified mass graves, with another 40,000 in the postwar period, including the remains of Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, which have yet to be found, with only 19,000 bodies currently recovered.  In 2007, thirty years after democratic rule was established, Spain passed the Historical Memory Law, The Historical Memory Law (Law 52/2007 of December 26th), which not only condemns Franco's actions during the civil war but provides a legal framework to exhume buried bodies, using scientific DNA methods to trace and identify victims buried in mass graves, while also requiring statues, plaques, and other symbols of the dictatorship to be removed from public places.  Almodóvar was an executive producer on THE SILENCE OF OTHERS (2018), a documentary film that examines the 6-year struggle to discover the missing victims, which may have been the stimulus for making this film.  The main criticism is the structural nature, as the central story about the two women actually dominates the film, while the historical perspective, which carries much greater weight, is only added tangentially.  For instance, while Almodóvar intersperses his film with painful reminders of Spain’s civil war, it’s not the centerpiece, as it is in the César Díaz film about the still-existing open wounds from the 36-year Guatemalan civil war, 2019 Top Ten List #8 Our Mothers (Nuestras madres), which documents the painstakingly slow task of excavating dead bodies littered around the country in unmarked graves.  In a book of interviews published in 2006, Almodóvar said, “Twenty years ago, my revenge against Franco was to not even recognize his existence, his memory; to make my films as if he had never existed.  Today I think it fitting that we don’t forget that period, and remember that it wasn’t so long ago.” 

Essentially the story of two pregnant mothers, Janis (Penélope Cruz), a photojournalist and commercial photographer approaching 40, and Ana (newcomer Milena Smit), a single teen living with her mother, meeting at the hospital and striking up a friendship surrounding their perfectly healthy newborn daughters.  With dizzying economy, Almodóvar establishes the premise of his film in just a few minutes, including an initial photo session with Arturo (Israel Elejalde), a renowned forensic archaeologist, asking for his help in excavating a mass grave in her home village, a place where her great-grandfather, who was also a photographer, is presumably buried, along with several of his compatriots that he photographed before they fell at the hands of Franco’s soldiers, all victims of the Spanish civil war, as she wants them to be buried with their family respectfully, a project that takes time to get funding approval, followed by dinner over a bottle of wine, white curtains billowing in the breeze, a sign of sexual activity happening inside, then jumping ahead to the hospital room.  Both pregnancies are unplanned, with Janis delighted, something she’s always wanted, while the more vulnerable Ana is less enthused, showing signs of regret, yet it’s the starting point of a developing friendship, as women typically take center stage in Almodóvar’s films.  While the title is deceiving, as they don’t actually live parallel lives, they actually intersect at one point, nearly indistinguishable, becoming one and the same, calling into question just what the director had in mind, though it may also refer to the two separate plot lines in the film.  While the director spends considerable time developing the different lives of each mother, they remain close, sharing baby pictures, and looking out for one another.  When Arturo comes to visit the baby, right off the bat he feels no connection, going so far as to think the baby is not his, but she refuses to do a paternity test, which just happens to mirror the scientific methods used by Arturo in his excavation projects, and serves as the bridge between the two plots.  This throws Janis for a loop, already raising the child alone, as Arturo is a married man, leaving her feeling more disconnected from him.  Ana’s mother, Teresa (Mother Teresa, get it?), played by Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, is anything but a saint, in fact she’s an actress, a diva in every respect, as her life continually swirls around herself, where her career is all that matters, cast as the lead in a Lorca drama, going on a theatrical tour, leaving her daughter behind to raise her own child by herself, abandoning her when she needs her the most.  Accordingly, a mystifyingly unfortunate tragedy occurs, leaving no rational explanation, no foul play – it simply happens.  Melodramas are born out of someone’s misfortune.  The entire film, however, reverberates around that confounding and inexplicable event, weaving layer upon layer of aftereffects that continually haunt each of the characters, reminding viewers that life, as well as history, continually throws us a curve, filled with buried secrets and repressed family dramas, with the director allowing these characters to take some solace and relief in each other, perhaps helping in the healing process.  This being an Almodóvar film, that healing takes different forms than might be expected, bringing the two women into closer proximity, with Ana actually moving into her home, allowing Janis to return to work, where one of the more tender scenes is Janis teaching Ana how to peel potatoes for a potato omelet in the sanctuary of the kitchen, a definitive female space in Almodóvar films, with words emblazoned on her T-shirt, “WE SHOULD ALL BE FEMINISTS.”  In this budding friendship, Ana reveals the cause of her initial trepidation in getting pregnant, yet another tragedy, but one all too familiar in the lives of women.  Like waves against the shore, both become mirror images of one another, where tenderness leads to affection, and even love, eventually sharing the same bed, developing a brazenly sexual love affair, beautifully realized through the music of Janis Joplin, after whom she was named, Janis Joplin - Summertime YouTube (4:00), heightening the sexual allure of the scene, a throwback to the free love era, yet meticulously done.  Ana seems more lovestruck in a dreamy kind of way, naïve and overly innocent, having never heard of Janis Joplin, overwhelmed by a maternal comfort and trust provided that was always missing with her own mother, while the more mature Janis has other options in play.  They soon go back to leading their own lives, yet come together in the end during a women’s solidarity march to the excavation site, a female re-enactment of Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s 1901 painting Il quarto stato (Original file).    

Almodóvar concocts a story about mothers searching for and then discovering terrible truths, where confronting their own personal tragedies frames a larger question about finding the hidden secrets of a nation that struggles to come to terms with the collective memory of the Spanish Civil War, and the 40 years of fascist dictatorship that ensued, as the streets of Madrid are named after the generals who displaced and killed thousands.  Spain is believed to have more mass graves than any country except Cambodia.  Part of the problem is there’s been no public funding for exhumations, so individuals or villages (which is what happens here) have had to scrape together funding from alternative, private sources, not really knowing where to start.  While the nation has taken strides to remove fascist shrines, in accordance with the Historical Memory Law, it was only in 2019 that Franco’s shrine was removed, following a long and controversial legal process, from the Valley of the Fallen, where it had become a far-right sanctuary, a fascist temple that exalted the memory of General Francisco Franco and his 36-year dictatorship.  Partly built by the forced labor of political prisoners, the entire grounds of the Valley of the Fallen covers more than 3,360 acres, and is Spain’s largest mass grave, containing the remains of more than 33,000 victims, so a story witnessing Janis bringing justice to her family feels deeply personal, particularly to viewers in Spain, where so many never had a single conversation about Franco or that time, where much of this history has been forgotten through political amnesia.  Accordingly, one of the more straightforward sections of the film leads back to the elderly women in Janis’s home town, speaking movingly about what losing their fathers and grandfathers meant to them.  All of which seems to suggest that fascist legacies continue, often in ways people can’t anticipate, corroding lives over decades and generations, where their descendants continue to be victims, as it still tears families apart even after all these years, haunting everyone else as well, right down to their private lives, and their collective psyches.  It’s worth pointing out that this film has had greater success in international festivals than in Spain itself, where it has not been a massive box office hit, suggesting Spain still remains deeply divided about the Franco historical past.  Janis, herself, offers a history lesson to young Ana, angrily reminding her that she needs to know what type of country she lives in.  Penélope Cruz has become associated with the voice of Almodóvar, appearing in 7 of his last 11 films, and nominated for a Best Actress award for her role here, yet much of this feels exaggerated and over-the-top, told with a melodramatic assurance, offering surprising revelations, dry humor, and unbridled emotion, all expressed through the saturated cinematography of José Luis Alcaine, filled with that strikingly bold color scheme from Antxón Gómez’s production design, and a percussive Hitchcockian score by Alberto Iglesias, which is particularly effective over the closing credits sequence, which is among the more cleverly designed sequences, filmed as if examining developing photographs, with animated writing on each frame.  Over the past forty years, Almodóvar’s  films have gone from wildly flamboyant and transgressive, filled with sexual deviations and rebellious asides, to a gradually more serious and contemplative aesthetic, where even in his most recent films, life is not what it seems, as Pain and Glory (Dolor y Gloria) (2019) plays with the viewer’s understanding of reality, moving in and out of time, altering one’s idea of memory, while in Julieta (2016), a middle-aged woman confronts the ghosts of her life.  Women throughout his career have always inhabited characteristics of a fearless strength, not always by choice, but they have adapted to the tragedies that have often overwhelmed them, finding a way to move on in their lives, as if unscathed from the stain of history.  Janis was raised by a grandmother who recalled the most intimate details of the war and lived most of her life under dictatorship, transferring her fierce independent values to Janis, who becomes an ardent proponent for her great-grandfather’s cause.  Conversely, Ana was raised by an indifferent and apolitical mother who never instilled her daughter with a sense of indignance for her country’s past evils, believing instead that “all actors are leftists,” which might suggest she’s right-leaning, yet, ironically, her big break came with a playwright shot by the fascists.  In this film, with Spain, along with other parts of Europe (and even America), presently undergoing a wave of neofascism, where Vox, the far-right party now in Spain, is dedicated to rewriting history from a very Franco-friendly point of view, claiming it was the Republicans that started the war, Almodóvar stares straight into the eye of that dilemma, declaring “No one in your family has told you the truth about your country.”  The personal and the political become an indistinguishable part of the Spanish nation’s collective psyche, where it is only by confronting the crimes of the past that Spain’s modern era population can hopefully address the future.  In today’s political reality, it is a human right of dignity that families have an opportunity in honoring and remembering the lives of those they have lost.