LYS CINEMAS. Passeig de Russafa, 3
This Friday the Valencian production opens in commercial theaters Stuka experiment. Directed by Pepe Andreu and Rafa Molés, The work tells a little-known fact from our history. We are in May of the year 1938, in the middle of the Civil War. Above the sky of four small towns in Castellón, the silhouette of three airplanes appears. What the inhabitants of these modest towns did not know is that those planes arrived with a mission: bomb them. Francoist propaganda spread the idea that the Republican side had been responsible for the attack.. That idea remained in everyone's imagination for almost 80 years. Until Oscar Lives, neighbor of Benasal, one of the affected populations, decides to put the pieces together and reveal the mystery. The first clue to the facts is found in the investigations carried out by the British historian Anthony Beevor.. This information would take him to the military archive in Freiburg where he would find all the missing documentation..
The three planes did not belong to the Republican aviation, They were devices of the Condor Legion, sent by Hitler to Spain to collaborate with the national side. But the mission to bomb those four towns was beyond the collaboration established with Franco.. The German command had chosen Spain as a testing ground for new military weapons.. This was the case of the three planes chosen for the mission., three new Junkers devices 87, the well-known Stuka, whose ability to carry bombs they wanted to test. The Stuka were characterized by being light aircraft that had the particularity of attacking by plummeting on their targets.. This characteristic of its maneuverability limited its loading capacity., hence the interest of the German high command in calibrating its capacity to transport a new bomb. 500 kg, double those launched until then, according to those responsible for this production.
“Stuka experimenttells the story of a citizen who, tired of waiting for answers, decides to answer all the questions himself. It is a social film that does not raise a historiographic debate, but it does talk about history. Precisely from a very unique reality, the causes why History is disconnected from its own protagonists: silence, fear, ideologization…”, the directors tell in the notes that accompany this work. “In addition to documenting a fact little studied in European war history, Stuka experimentIt also addresses the psychological background of all war: tiny decisions, random, unconscious, cruel or cowardly that trigger tragedies that add up to the infinite account of the stupidity of human beings.”
In the mouths of those responsible, Stuka experimenttries to take the facts out of the abstraction of war photographs and archives and bring them to the particularity of individual people. “Killing another human being is not easy. That is the personal and ethical thesis that we maintain. That's why, War is filled with mechanisms that allow soldiers to do what they have to do. Both the victims and the executioners have a certain lack of knowledge of the act of which they are protagonists. On the one hand, the victims did not even feel fear when they saw the planes, They found it a curious fact. For your part, “The three young German pilots chosen to fly those new planes were also far from direct and emotional contact with their victims.” This is how the two directors summarize their intentions. “In the end, neither victims nor executioners saw each other and the decision to carry out the massacre had been made by someone thousands of kilometers away.” And a final intention: that of encouraging, for once, to reconciliation between the two sides. “Knowing what happened to their people after 80 years of silence reconciled the residents of the four municipalities of Castellón. The silence had always sown doubt about who had really been guilty of those indiscriminate deaths.. No one in the area had known about it to date.. They were all victims of the criminal mind
