Freedom Fighters

“Summer of 1936. 18 July. The Spanish army rises up against the Republican government. 19 July. In Barcelona and Madrid, the army is defeated thanks to the heroic effort of the people. 20 July. The masses demand a revolutionary state. The legal government is unable to control the situation. 21 July. The Spanish Civil War has begun, the last idealistic war, the last dream of a people reaching for the impossible, for utopia.”

Vicente Aranda’s film opens with these informational titles. Set during the early hours of the revolution in Catalonia, the initial sequence—partly based on a montage from Reportaje del movimiento revolucionario en Barcelona—plunges us into a heated atmosphere. Two militants from the anarchist women’s movement Free Women burst into a brothel with the aim of persuading the prostitutes to break their chains and join their cause. They also find a young novice who had thought she could escape the anarchist militiamen by taking refuge there.

Born from the imagination of its creator, the story unfolds along two parallel narratives. One focuses on the individual fate of the nun, recruited against her will, who—together with her new comrades in struggle—discovers a generous and joyful anarchism, surprisingly close in many ways to the religious ideal she professes. The second follows the collective fate of this group of women, who must confront the prejudices of their male comrades in order to gain the right to join the Durruti column and fight on the Aragon front.

Despite its anachronisms and implausibilities, the historical reconstruction is inspired by the shared memory of the defeated—a memory that is, admittedly, incomplete and partial, but which the film embraces and to which it pays tribute. In an interview, the filmmaker made it clear that Libertarias aspired “to justify the memory that some may still preserve.”

With a soundtrack saturated with revolutionary songs, a diverse cast of characters, and Cinemascope images that exalt the anarchist struggle, the film chooses to operate in an emotional register. Following the path opened by Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom (1995), Freedom Fighters celebrates the historical possibilities that emerged during the revolutionary episode and advocates for the awakening of a partisan memory.

J-PA