Somewhere on the high plains of La Mancha in Spain resides a village that carries the name of its creator, Francisco Franco. The translation for the village’s name Llanos del Caudillo is The High Plains of the Caudillo. Caudillo is the equivalent to the German Fuehrer (Hitler) or the Italian Duce (Mussolini).

Llanos del Caudillo was one of over 300 settlement villages built during the dictatorship of General Franco between 1939 and 1975. The ideological goal of these communities was to create the new fascist man.

The film portraits this unordinary small town as if we were looking through a magnifying glass, reviewing the Spanish history since Franco took power until the present days, when judge Baltasar Garzón, famous for having prosecuted Augusto Pinochet, has been convicted by the Spanish Supreme Court and banned from office for 11 years because of his attempt to investigate the crimes committed during Franco´s dictatorship.

Franco’s Settlers is a contemporary evaluation of the figure of the dictator Franco; a discreet and calm attempt to dissect recent Spanish history and to review how some Spaniards deal with the cruel heritage of their past.

 

How can a village still carry the name of its country’s former dictator? When we first visited the village Llanos del Caudillo in 1999, this was a forbidden question and we had a hard time convincing residents to speak with us about the history of their own town.  The relevance of this film goes far beyond just telling a local story within Spain. It is a painful universal story of how after a long dictatorship the historic remembrance of that cruel period is still controlled by the perpetrators.  In the current political landscape, the question of how a country transitions from a dictatorship towards a democracy remains one of the most important political and social issues. The fall of the Berlin Wall meant the extinction of many former communist dictatorships. Rumania, Bulgaria, Poland, and Russia, all visited Spain, a country that in the opinion of many experts successfully transformed after Franco’s death in 1975 into a stable democracy. Recently though, Spanish historians and foreign Hispanists, such as, Paul Preston and Walther L. Bernecker have questioned the “Spanish Transition” and openly addressed that Spain has never really come to terms with its own painful past.

Current upheavals in the Arab and African world ensure that more countries will be attempting this transition in the future. Ultimately the huge undertaking of shifting an entire government from one model to another is global as Felipe González, former leader of the opposition to Franco and later elected four times Prime Minister of the new democratic Spain expresses in our film: “When Franco died there was this excitement, the same I recently saw in Tunisia. Some things are just universal”.

The global relevance of this story cannot be stressed enough. A small village that carries the name of a dictator seems like a clear indicator that undemocratic values and a lack of historic information still exist in Spain and elsewhere in the world. How can it be that in our film the majority of school children defend the dictator? Why is it that Judge Baltasar Garzón who arrested the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet has been convicted and banned from office for investigating the crimes committed by the Franco regime?

These internationally relevant questions are discussed democratically in our film, which combines with equal weight the commentaries by the villagers of Llanos del Caudillo with those of famous politicians and experts, confirmed fascists and old opposition leaders.