Willem Thijssen

Willem Thijssen

A young Belgian woman is in search of her past and that of her parents, and revisits the social revolution in Catalonia, in 1936, followed by the Spanish Civil War. Through a subjective journey, the memoirs of anarcho-syndicalist Juan Garcia Oliver, fictionalized scenes, archival footage, and documentary images, the hopes for a better future are juxtaposed to that future, exemplified by the great strike in Belgium in 1960, Provo in the Netherlands, May 1968 in France, and the feminist movement. Utopia meets Power. There are the pessimism of 1937 and the fatalism of 1983, so close to ‘1984.’ Will the optimism of 1936 and of 1976, with the rise of democracy in Spain, survive the confrontation with Power?