Life and filmography of Llorenç Soler (1936 – 2022), a creative pioneer of independent documentary cinema under Franco's dictatorial regime in Spain during the 1960s and '70s, when the information monopoly belonged to state-controlled NO-DO newsreels and RTVE, tools of political propaganda.
Documentary about the history of experimental cinema in Spain. FRAGMENTS is a historical survey of “the other” Spanish Cinema — films that brazenly explored their artistic, poetic and conceptual potential. Spanish experimental cinema can be glimpsed in a series of important yet isolated events that FRAGMENTS compiles through various firsthand accounts, film excerpts and documents. For the first time in Spain, a documentary brings together the most relevant of a cinema that is slowly losing its invisibility.
The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) caused a great impression on the lives of most of the American artists of that era, so many movies were made in Hollywood about it. The final defeat of the Spanish Republic left an open wound in the hearts of those who sympathized with its cause. The eventful life of screenwriter Alvah Bessie (1904-1985), one of the Hollywood Ten, serves to analyze this sadness, the tragedy of Spain and its consequences.
Lola is a young gypsy of uncertain origin who was adopted, as a newborn, by a family among whom she has grown up with gypsy customs and traditions. When the young woman finishes high school, she considers, against her family and her social environment, to continue her studies and pursue a teaching career. At that moment of his adolescent life, love appears when he meets Juan, a gypsy of his age.
In 1939, just finished the Spanish Civil War, Spanish republican photographer Francesc Boix escapes from Spain; but is captured by the Nazis in 1940 and imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp, in Austria, a year later. There, he works as a prisoner in the SS Photographic Service, hiding, between 1943 and 1945, around 20,000 negatives that later will be presented as evidence during several trials conducted against Nazi war criminals after World War II.
On June 14, 1977, the eve of the first democratic elections after Franco's regime, Llorenç Soler and his crew go out into the street and ask passers-by which party they are going to vote for.