Screening of Alejo Moguillansky's Con la venia /If it pleases the court (2022)

The screening will be followed by a discussion with Maria Delgado and Bryce Lease (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama/Staging Difficult Pasts), Cecilia Sosa (Goldsmiths/Staging Difficult Pasts), and Alejo Moguillansky (filmmaker). Baltasar Garzón will join the discussion online.

The theatre as a courtroom, the courtroom as a theatre. The panel will include a screening of Alejo Moguillansky's Con la venia/If it pleases the court [56 mins], followed by a discussion with the director, Maria Delgado, Cecilia Sosa, Bryce Lease, and Baltasar Garzón. Produced as a joint venture between El Pampero Cine and the AHRC-funded Staging Difficult Pasts project, the film draws loosely on Raúl Quirós Molina's El pan y la sal (The Bread and the Salt), a 2015 verbatim theatre piece compiled from the testimonies provided during the 2012 trial of Judge Baltasar Garzón, for investigating the forced disappearances of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime. Juxtaposing the testimonies of the relatives of those who lost loved ones with references to Argentina's and Chile's recent dictatorships, this film explores issues around international law and forced disappearance - tracing a line between Francisco Franco, Augusto Pinochet and Jorge Videla's Military Junta: Garzón has investigated Argentine torturers and criminal perpetrators and had Pinochet arrested in London in 1998 for crimes against humanity. The layers of the past unfold into the present as the abuses of three dictatorships resonate through the present, imposing an ethical demand that goes beyond the legal and beyond national borders.