Solidarity in Madrid with the Venezuelan film series after extremist censorship

Published at: 21/03/2025 01:40 PM

The Venezuelan film Operation Orion was screened this Thursday in the auditorium of the Ateneo 1st of May Foundation of the Workers' Comisions union (CCOO), in Madrid, Spain, amid high expectations, after having been forcibly rescheduled due to attempts to boycott its dissemination by extremist sectors.

Among those attending the screening, the first vice-president of the Congressional Foreign Affairs Committee and general secretary of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), deputy Enrique Santiago, who expressed all his affection for the Venezuelan people and recorded the reasons why he came to see the film.

“We wanted to come to make it clear that there are many sectors of Spanish society committed to defending freedom of expression and supporting all the just causes of peoples,” he said, according to a press release from the Venezuelan Embassy in Spain.

The film by director Rubén Hernández Remón, which is part of the Venezuelan proposal on Cinema and Memory: The Voice of the People and the Struggle for Sovereignty, had the support of the public who came to the place to confirm their support for the work, which tells the case of the 153 paramilitaries captured during 2004, in the vicinity of Caracas, Venezuela, while they were preparing to commit an assassination against President Hugo Chávez Frías.

In this regard, Santiago assured that the current situation is marked by “times when the truth is permanently hidden or distorted. That's why I think the reaction is due to the fact that the counterrevolutionary sectors are very afraid of the story of a film that narrates events that occurred in Venezuela, that are historical and that are constantly distorted, distorted and hidden.”

For his part, Daniel Gismero, Secretary of Studies and Culture of CCOO Madrid and representative of the hosts of the audiovisual exhibition, considered that all spaces should always be open to culture in all its expressions.

“We don't understand that there is censorship in culture, we don't understand what harm there can be in wanting to screen some films and, therefore, for us (CCOO) it is an obligation to be able to provide our spaces so that these exhibitions can be seen, ” he emphasized.

Meanwhile, Pilar Alcolea, from the October Social Center in Guadalajara, expressed her solidarity and affection with Venezuela during the prelude to the screening. “What has happened is barbaric, it is curtailing the right to culture, to freedom of expression of peoples,” he repudiated.

The film series will continue on Monday, March 24, with the screening, starting at 6:30 p.m., of “The Battle of the Bridges”, a documentary by renowned director Carlos Azpúrua, current president of the National Autonomous Cinematography Center (CNAC).

Mazo News Team