Extranjeros de sí mismos (2000) User Reviews

Bringing back the memory of a war

[davidcarbajales · 8/10 · 28 October 2002]

That film is a documentary about the several groups of volunteers that fought in the Spanish Civil War. Volunteers for the fascist cause and for the republican cause, as well. Each part is presented by a off-voice who introduces us to the supposed real feelings of this people in that very moment.

First of all, the turn for the Italian volunteers who believed they were sent to the glory and they found the horror in the Spanish War and how they keep on celebrate those times in the present, still believing in fascism and in General Franco as a redeeming hero sent by God. The second chapter: the foreigners who came from the democratic countries, such as Great Britain, France and the States, most of them were communists, but not all of them. And how they discovered that the governments of their countries refused to help them and how those governments left Spain in the hands of the fascism.

The third part: the Spanish young people who, over-excited because of the victory in Spain, decided to take part in the Second World War, as a Division of the German Army, called the Blue Division: División Azul, who fought in Russia, near Leningrado, the nowadays called Saint Petersburg.

The makers of the documentary show us the facts, not their interpretations, I mean, they want to be aseptic and I think they get it.

A must see, to a more comprehensive knowledge of those terrible times.

The Spanish Civil War as a paradigm of the 20th Century.

[brownieboy · 10/10 · 19 December 2001]

This documentary, mostly about the Spanish war conflicts of the 1930s, acts as an exposé of the futility and failure of some of the ideologies that dominated the Western world in the mid-20th Century. Nazis, fascists, communists and anarchists, no one is free of responsibility; no one sees their ideals fulfilled.

The film is specially poignant for Spanish viewers, who will walk away with moist eyes; but it has enough moments of profound humanity to emote anyone. It is also very successful at unraveling the baffling complexity of the Spanish Civil War, where nothing was quite black or white, even though the combatants and political leaders acted as if it was. The whole world was watching but no-one acted, and those who took a stance got burned badly. A special place in my heart is reserved for those foreign volunteers who came to defend the Spanish Republic, and whose sense of loss was only alleviated by the personal bonds that they left behind with the Spanish people.

In the end, by the time one hears about the outlandish experiences of Spanish volunteers fighting with the Germans against Stalin in the Russian front, one realizes that the previous century was one big, obscene theater of the absurd, and that the Spaniards seemed to be pretty good actors in it. With a special cameo by Luis García Berlanga, the noted director of "The Executioner" and "Life Size," who fought against the Russians in order to prevent his father from being executed by Franco loyalists back home in Spain.