EUROSUD hold a regular film night for students and staff focusing on movies about Southern Europe or filmed in Southern Europe. The group are asked to come up with suggestions for viewing. After the viewing there is a discussion about the film. This is a great regular social event for the all!
The recent screening watched was Letters from War (Portuguese: Cartas da Guerra) which is based around a collection of letters written by a young soldier, doctor and an aspirant writer, to his wife while he was serving in Angola between 1971 and 1973, during the Portuguese Colonial War. Following the movie, we talked about the War itself and then also what patterns arise in the movie that we can identify in other conflicts as well.
The first screening was Soldiers of Salamina (David Trueba, 2003)
https://www.europeanfilmawards.eu/en_EN/film/soldiers-of-salamina.5846
The movie is inspired by a best-seller novel under the same name written by Javier Cercas. In it “The narrator is fascinated by the way memory congeals into history: the insidious process by which personal narratives become part of a past that can no longer be verified, and is therefore taken to be the truth, even though it is only one possible version of what actually happened. As Cercas points out, the events of the Spanish civil war, which took place only a generation earlier, are becoming as distant and fixed as the story of the soldiers who fought the Persian fleet at Salamis more than 2,000 years earlier.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jun/21/fiction
Here you can find an interview with the author of the novel, Javier Cercas:
https://theconversation.com/coming-to-terms-with-the-past-the-puzzling-politics-of-memory-6841
Those of you interested in academic analyses about the novel can find several references under Google Scholar:
https://scholar.google.es/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=soldiers+of+salamina&btnG=
https://scholar.google.es/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=soldiers+of+salamis&btnG=