NZIFF: The Teacher Who Promised the Sea (1)

A progressive teacher brings new methods to a village in Burgos on the eve of the Spanish Civil War, whilst in present day Catalonia a woman searches for answers as to the whereabouts of her great-grandfather’s remains.

Catalan filmmaker Patricia Font in her sophomore feature takes us to 1930s Spain by way of real-life figure Antonio Benaiges, a Freinet educator assigned to teach in the small village of Bañuelos de Bureba. Intertwined with these flashback sequences are scenes from present day Catalonia and Burgos where Ariadna, the granddaughter of one of Antonio’s pupils, seeks to locate ancestral remains at the mass graves of La Pedraja.

Antonio’s leftist leanings and critiques of the new Francoist government anger the more conservative townsfolk, particularly the town mayor, despite his daughter being one of the pupils benefiting most from Antonio’s teachings. Meanwhile, Ariadna teeters between hope and despair in her search for closure at La Pedraja, a human vessel embodying the plight of a nation still wrestling with the consequences of a brutal conflict.

The closing credits remark that the remains of 12,000 people have been exhumed across the country. Like Ariadna, the film attempts to seek answers from the horrors of a war that took place almost a century ago – one driven by political sentiments that feel unsettlingly familiar as some of today’s most powerful nations shift towards fascism. — Matt Bloomfield

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