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If it Please the Court (Con la venia)
Institute of Contemporary Arts
Digital

Cinema 3
If it Please the Court (Con la venia)

The theatre as a courtroom, the courtroom as a theatre. Alejo Moguillansky’s 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 Garzon, 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. 

Directed by the award-winning Argentine filmmaker Alejo Moguillansky, and produced as a joint venture between El Pampero Cine and the AHRC-funded Staging Difficult Pasts project, this experimental and multi-layered piece interweaves archival material from Garzon’s trial, footage of sites of memory from the three countries and testimony from the trial to restage the haunting urgency of listening to the victims. The testimony is read by an international cast of writers, historians, actors, stage directors and relatives of disappeared persons and political refugees, for whom the legacy of dictatorship remains very much alive. 

 We are delighted that director Alejo Moguillansky will be joining us at the ICA for an in-person Q&A following the screening of his latest feature The Middle Ages on Saturday 1 July at 4pm.
 
This film is no longer available to stream on Cinema 3.