Olas de Recuerdo is a short documentary directed by Naomi Garcia Pasmanick, a filmmaker from San Francisco, who travels to the small fisherman village in Galicia where her grandmother was born to find out about the circumstances that led her family to flee Spain as refugees after the Spanish Civil War. This 20-30 minute short weaves together interviews by the eldest members of the Coloret family, who, in their 90s, recall the anarco-syndicalist movements of the early 1930s and how their family's participation in the labor movement of the time led their family members to be brutally repressed during Franco’s military takeover in 1936.
More than simply a recounting of the past, this film poses the question of how memory operates under trauma and censorship. Though Naomi’s grandparents never wanted to talk about the violence they endured during the war, generational trauma has a way of making itself known. Through the liminal spaces of memory and the existing images from the past, Naomi examines the stories that have shaped the lives of women in her family, and, in effect, her own life. The story traces their humble roots in rural Galicia to their exile to New York and eventual move to California, where Naomi is born.
The finished project will be a rich portrait of a family rooted in place and a mediation on the complexities of memory, migration, and identity. On a historical level, I hope that recounting the story of the tension preceding and during the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent trauma inherited from survivors will call attention to the dangers of unchecked right-wing extremism in a young democracy. This film resonates with the current political climate of rising conservatism and serves as a call to action to defend women's and worker's rights against rising fascist movements.