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The Teacher Who Promised the Sea

This was the film chosen to preview the Spanish Film Festival for 2024 and it's quite the heart-wrencher. Based on a true story, from a book by Francesc Escribano, it tells of Antonio Benaiges (Enric Auquer), an idealistic teacher from Catalonia, who takes up a position in the small town of Bañuelos de Bureba in 1935. This town is probably like many others of the time - conservative, religious and fearful of outsiders. It's also full of kids who haven't seen the sea, which brings us to the title. Discovering that his charges have no idea about the sea, Antonio promises to take them on a trip to the Catalan coast, and much of the film is about his attempts to get permission from their inflexible parents.

The depressing backdrop to all this is the impending Spanish Civil War between the Republicans and the Nationalists. Antonio ruffles a whole pelican's worth of feathers, from the politically pragmatic mayor, Alcalde (Antonio Mora), to the Snape-ish priest, the suitably named Padre Primitivo (Milo Taboada). This doesn't help his cause when the fascists come sniffing around. The kids that slowly roll up to be taught Antonio's modern methods appear to be his one bulwark, save for the cautious old cleaner of his house, Charo (Luisa Gavasa).

The framing device for the story is that a young mother in nearly current-day Catalonia, Ariadna (Laia Costa) gets a call from a group who exhume human remains. Apparently, her grandfather registered his interest in finding his father many years ago, and now there's a chance he may have been unearthed. As her grandfather has lost most of his faculties and is living in a care home, Ariadna decides she needs to look into it. When she arrives in the province of Burgos, she meets an old classmate of her grandad's, Emilio (Ramón Agirre) and they start to piece things together, with handy flashback assistance.

This is dripping in sentimentality but it mostly finds the right balance of mawkishness and sincerity, the final scene being the peak example. In pairing the stories of Antonio and Ariadna, the film gives us a handhold to the past, a reminder that this horrible fucking regime only ended with the death of Franco in 1975. The reactions of the villagers to Ariadna and the exhumers shows there's still a lot of baggage to deal with, even in the 21st century.

The Teacher Who Promised the Sea is a touching, rage-inducing drama, well delivered by director, Patricia Font. It's screening as part of the HSBC Spanish Film Festival from June 13th to July 3rd at Palace and Luna cinemas.

See also:

This film reminded me of Claude Lelouch's version of Les Miserables (1995) in its forward-backward timelines. An excellent film about unorthodox teaching methods is Laurent Cantet's The Class (2008).

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