16 Shots, Midnight Traveler, The Serengeti Rules, The Nightcrawlers among night's other winners The Silence of Others, the Oscar shortlisted film about Spain's willful act of amnesia over the horrors of the Franco era, won two awards at the News and Documentary Emmy ceremony Tuesday night, including Best Documentary. The film directed by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar also won Outstanding Politics and Government Documentary at the virtual event. "We are really super-thrilled," Carracedo commented after the announcement of Best Documentary, a category that included 16 Shots, The King, Under the Wire, and At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal. Bahar added, "We dedicate this award to all our protagonists." The 41st. Annual News & Documentary Emmy® Awards honors programming content from more than 2000 submissions that originally premiered in calendar-year 2019, judged by a pool of 875 peer professionals from across the television and streaming/digital media News & Documentary industry. Among those protagonists is elderly María Martín, whose mother was killed in the early years of Franco's fascist rule, which extended from 1939 until the dictator's death in 1975, and Chato Galante, who was tortured by the regime's police state in 1968. After Franco's passing, Spain transitioned to democracy and the national legislature adopted a "pact of forgetting" meant to formally ignore the past and ignore its traumas, but Martín and Galante were among the many who refused to accept papering over state-orchestrated crimes. Evidence of those atrocities is scattered around Spain, though often unmarked. "There's still more than 100,000 bodies buried in mass graves," Bahar told Nonfictionfilm.com, referring to dissidents wiped out during Franco's reign. Carracedo noted, "[It] was basically a systematic repression, a systematic sort of extermination and repression of not just political opponents, but anyone who dared to think different." Related: |
AuthorMatthew Carey is a documentary filmmaker and journalist. His work has appeared on Deadline.com, CNN, CNN.com, TheWrap.com, NBCNews.com and in Documentary magazine. |