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Atlas of Disappearance review – forensic quest for thousands of forgotten victims of the Spanish civil war
['Phuong Le']
The Guardian
Perched on the Sierra de Guadarrama mountain range overlooking Madrid is the Valle de los Caídos, a colossal memorial site constructed under the Franco regime.
There are, however, tens of thousands more bodies are trapped inside; in the aftermath of the White Terror, the corpses of those executed under the dictatorship were clandestinely removed from mass graves and deposited in the monument’s crypt.
Through examining various construction blueprints, the film lays bare how the crypt was specifically designed for maximum inaccessibility.
The bodies of the victims were meant to languish, hidden away, in perpetuity, as does the evidence of the dictatorship’s barbarity.
The film ends on the evocative image of water seeping through the crevices of the Valle de los Caídos, causing internal structural damage.