THE DRUNKMEN’S MARSEILLAISE

UN PUEBLO QUE CANTA NO MUERE - La Marsellesa de los Borrachos

Spain, France, Italy | 2024 | 93 min | col./bw.

A reverse journey on the steps of other adventurers. By way of an editing style in which past and present alternate harmoniously, Pablo Gil Rituerto and his crew go back on the adventure of ethno-musicologists Cantacronache who, in 1961, challenged Francoist censorship and explored Spain to collect information on the folk songs of the civil war. Those semi-clandestine recordings ended in the record Canciones de la Resistencia Española, a classic of folk music and the ‘soundtrack’ of protests, in Italy as well. Not coincidentally, the Spanish caudillo spitefully liquidated it as “the Drunkmen's Marseillaise.” The never-healed wounds caused by Franco’s violence still bleed, but with them re-lives the unchanged strength of that sorrowful, passioned music that seemed to foreshadow a better world and today is more necessary than ever. (e.s.)