Although the documentary has served, in diverse geographical contexts, as a reinforcement in the construction of official or institutional memory, it has also been a powerful tool that filmmakers with critical discourses have used as a cultural arsenal to implode unique visions subject to change. 

Likewise, documentary cinema is also a space open to creativity and exploration of new forms and narratives that serve, ultimately, to shape polyhedral memories and heterogeneous voices. In the case of Catalonia, in the last two decades a group of non-fiction films have been produced that advocate the recovery of the traumatic past of the Civil War and Franco's repression, and that often make characters, realities and aspects appear unique cultures of this geography. 

Throughout the sessions, and through reflection on the concepts of official memory, collective memory, post-memory or counter-memory, among others, as well as through the analysis of fragments of the most representative of the corpus, Prof. Laia Quílez will try to map the strategies narratives and aesthetics most used by documentary filmmakers to tell and vindicate memories of a recent past that still permeate our present today.

Prof. Laia Quílez Esteve (Barcelina, 1978) is an Associated Professor and Director of the Department of Communication Studies at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain). She holds a degree in Audiovisual Communication from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and in Literature Theory and Comparative Literature from the Universitat de Barcelona. In 2020, Prof. Quílez finished her PhD with a thesis on post-memory and the Argentinian documentary cinema. She is also member of the research group ASTERISC. In 2017, Quílez co-edited the book Posmemoria de la guerra civil y el franquismo: Narrativas audiovisuales y producciones culturales en el siglo XXI (Editorial Comares).