Resistance reels

The figure of Fernando Ruiz Vergara was both enigmatic and rebellious. Director of only one work, his documentary Rocío (1980), censored in the early days of democracy for dismantling the relations between religious, political and economic power in Andalusia and which is still banned today in Spain. Alejandro Alvarado and Concha Barquero, authors of the award-winning documentary Pepe el andaluz (2012) about the diaspora and oblivion during the Civil War, have approached him and the sketches he left behind after his death. Anchored in this archaeology of unfinished ideas, a film of fragments is constructed, of connections between the buried past and the present. This homage to a form of political work on the history of the forgotten is a kind of vindication of the projects dreamt by Fernando Ruiz Vergara, which take shape today as an act of resistance.