Review
January 1939. The downfall of Barcelona confirms the default of the Spanish republicans. 500,000 of them had chosen the exile. Once arrived in France, men are disarmed and put in camps: Saint Cyprien, Argelès. Gurs... Concerning their families, women, children and old people, the administration distributes them in improvised centers, most of them in Ardèche. Elles et moi chooses to follow up the destiny of the Estevas all along these terrible months and the five war years that followed them. Lluís, the father, does not accept the defeat. He lives pursuing the reconquest and sacrifices his own destiny to these ideals. Pilar, his wife, expects to survive in this new country that she guesses will be hers during a long time. Together with her two children, Isabel and Ignacio, first in Ardèche and then in Marsella, always brave, firm, and with a prodigious capacity to adapt, she will accept the help and the proofs of a society undermined by the default and the cooperation. Sixty years later, Isabel Esteva, a famous costume designer, presents in Paris her last fashion collection. She evokes the memories of this confused time; her brother when he entered the Pétain's militia at 17 because he was famine; her father died in October 1944, once back in Spain with some other thousand combatants to prepare an insurrection against general Franco. War, exile, oppression, expectancy always disappointing, and at the same time feeling renewed, for a better world. Life goes on. |
