Filling the voids of memory: Alzheimer’s disease and recent history in Nedar and Bucarest, la memòria perduda

After the Franco dictatorship, the politics of the past in Spain became a problematic issue. The work of mourning those defeated during the Spanish Civil War had to be postponed during Francoism and recovered during the transition to democracy, a process marked by intense public debates on the history and memory of the Spanish Civil War. During the course of the last decade, the grandchildren of the combatants started to literally unearth the dead and tried to recover their memory. The Catalan documentaries made in 2008, Nedar (Carla Subirana) and Bucarest, la memòria perduda (Albert Solé), give Alzheimer’s disease a key role in the storytelling of the recent past. This article deals with the representation of that disease, understood as a metaphor for the forgetting of history, and the historical and theoretical implications derived from the use of fiction and archival images as means of filling the voids of memory.