Wars forever stay alive in our memory, in our skin, in the physical, psychological and emotional scars of an entire society; they live in the ditches and in the wounded landscape we all share, without always realizing it, in a collective oblivion and lies, or in the darkness of a madness often impervious to medication and conventional therapies. Given this, art, or certain collective creative mechanisms, can offer new hope for reconciliation, a first step towards healing or, at least, towards understanding and accepting what happened.

This series seeks to serve as a link towards that reality, transformed by the redeeming power of representation. A place from which to approach those creative and reflective processes of action and coexistence, of active confrontation with the experience of pain and fear, finally transformed into art. They are the scenarios of past wars, conflicts holding myths and storing memories that reverberate into the present through their ruins.

The restitution of an image, of the human figure, of dignity never lost, is also an essential part of this multi-angled view of the aftermath of wars. Mechanisms for recovering memory on which to build a fair history - one in line with reality - about the disasters we have been imposing through violence. Pedagogical and saving resources whose artistic creation is an instrument for finding a mutilated truth, a truth we are too often forced to uncover from beneath layers of false and self-interested, patriotic and somber, national historiographies.

Films that get us to face up to our own uncomfortable past, to read its images and representations from a critical, analytical perspective, like that of a surgeon looking into his dissection for the exact place the disease originated, to eradicate it, although not just that: but also to learn in detail where and why this ailment came about, and from there to be able to move towards the possibility of a cure.

David Varela