*

El País interview with Trisha Ziff

"...neutrality is complete nonsense"

"I don't think my documentary is going to be very popular in Spain; in fact I think that some of my coproducers weren't very happy with the idea of not focusing the film on the figure of Capa, as if it were a biography of him. The thing is that I lived in Northern Ireland for many years, and I have seen war. I didn't want to make a photography documentary because what interested me was the context. I remember that at the beginning of the film process a friend from Barcelona accompanied me to New York. On the plane he told me about the Historical Memory Law and Baltasar Garzón. I started La maleta mexicana at the same time as people in Spain were starting to dig in search of their loved ones. I didn't want to make a work about Capa's Spanish stage. I wanted to generate questions about the past."
[...]
"The neutrality of the director? That is nonsense: when you direct a documentary you are putting forward your point of view," says Ziff when asked about the central focus of the film - the work of the archeologists investigating the common graves opened up across Spain.
"I was very interested to meet those people and that was my big reward. All those people who work trying to get to know what happened to their relatives, digging up memory, have changed me as a person: that has been my reward."

read more here