When the Spanish military, led by General Franco, rebelled against the government in July 1936, civilian militia in the large cities--Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia--successfully resisted the uprising. For a time, it appeared that the rebellion would fail. But then the dictators, Hitler and Mussolini, provided military assistance to Franco, permitting the war to go on. Meanwhile, the western Allies, Britain and France, adopted a policy of non-intervention, hoping to prevent the Spanish war from igniting a second world war. The United States supported the policy of non-intervention.

Unable to find support from the western allies, the Republic welcomed assistance from the Soviet Union, which sold arms to Spain and sent military advisors. Communist leaders also encouraged volunteers to defend the Republic. About 35,000 men and women from 52 countries went to Spain, organizing the International Brigades and various medical units. Among them were 2,800 U.S. volunteers, the "Abraham Lincoln Brigade," from nearly every state in the union.

As Hitler and Mussolini tested new weapons and military tactics, the Spanish war anticipated the total warfare of World War II. In April 1937, for instance, German bombers attacked the town of Guernica, indiscriminately killing civilians in an atrocity immortalized by Pablo Picasso's painting, "Guernica." By 1938, the year that "Ay, Carmela!" is set, Franco adopted combined air, artillery, and tank warfare that foreshadowed the "blitzkrieg" attacks later used by the Germans in Poland, France, and the Soviet Union.

This kind of warfare targeted not only armies, but also civilians. At the beginning of the military rebellion, anarchist groups around Barcelona took revenge on their historic enemies by burning churches and killing priests. Once the Republican government regained control of the militias, such practices stopped. But the Franco side used terror as part of its efforts to conquer the Spanish people, as Ay, Carmela! shows. Executions of political leaders, such as the town mayor in the movie, were deliberate acts of revenge to stifle the civilian population.

Under Franco, consequently, there was little permissible discussion of the civil war and its political and cultural consequences. Even after the dictator died in 1975, Spain's transition to a democratic state required a tacit agreement among all groups not to discuss the moral or political controversies of the Franco era. The Spanish Civil War had no place in the educational curricula.

So, too, the Spanish film industry avoided the topic, except in limited ways. Saura's Ay, Carmela! broke that silence. Since 1990, public discussion of the war in Spain encouraged greater accountability from public figures for the crimes committed under the dictatorship. However, Spain, unlike South Africa or Chile, avoided a formal public reconciliation.

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