Montse Armengou Martín
Montse Armengou Martín is a Catalan journalist, investigative documentary filmmaker.
Since 1985 she has worked for Televisió de Catalunya. She has co-directed, with Ricard Belis, three award winnng documentary films, Los niños perdidos del franquismo (Franco's Forgotten Children, 2002), las fosas del silencio (the Spanish Holocaust, 2003), and El convoy de los 927 ( 927 on the train to Hell, 2004) - all three produced by the weekly programme, 30 Minuts, consisting of newsreel footage, legal documents, historical analysis by historians, video footage, personal memories testimonios. The films examine different aspects of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship; - the forced relocation of Republican children, disappearances and mass graves, and the 1940 deportation of Spanish Republicans from the French town of Angouleme to the Nazi concentration camp Mauthausen , Austria.
The films include many interviews, including with those who tell of how they were given to adoptive parents and how they hurt for being insulted for being the children of the "Reds" and by the fact they were never able to find their real parents. In The Spanish Holocaust in Zafra, Extramadura the daughter of last Republican mayor is intervviewed in the village square - a square that contains a monument to a Francoist commander, Captain Castejon, a man who ordered 1% of the village population to be shot.
References
- Unearthing Franco's Legacy, University of Notre Dame Press, 2010, 156-168.