EQZE to host a public seminar dedicated to Rosina Prado, a filmmaker exiled during the Spanish Civil War

Rosina Prado was four years old when, in 1939, her family went into exile in the Soviet Union. Her father, Pedro Prado Mendizábal, was a Navy officer and had served as the Army Chief of Staff under the government of the Second Republic during the Spanish Civil War. Her mother, Elisa Fernández Meroño, travelled with them. Her siblings had been evacuated months earlier with the group that later became known as the ‘Niños de Rusia’ (Children of Russia) and were living in a children’s home for Spanish exiles in Obninsk.

Born in Cartagena in 1935, Rosina Prado grew up in the USSR and in 1956 enrolled at VGIK, the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, where she studied Film Directing in Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s workshop and came into contact with other filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Larisa Shepitko. During her student years, she made El ir y venir de los trenes (1961), a short film about reunions and farewells at Moscow’s Kievskaya Station (the station from which trains departed for Europe) which the filmmaker would later describe as a metaphor for her own life.

That same year, her father was appointed as an advisor to the Cuban Navy, and the family left for Havana, where Rosina joined the newly created Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC). During her time in Cuba, she made five films: Ismaelillo (1962), Palmas cubanas (1963), ¿Qué es lo bello? (1965), La llamada del nido (1966) and El zoológico (1968), all under the auspices of either the Film Promotion Department (1961–1963) or the 35mm Documentaries Department (1964–1967). In 1964, she returned briefly to Moscow to complete her studies. She presented Ismaelillo and Palmas cubanas to a panel chaired by Roman Karmen (the same documentary filmmaker who had filmed the Spanish Civil War and the evacuation of the Children of Russia) and received top marks.

Prado did not return to Spain until 1977, after 38 years in exile. Her status as a female filmmaker, an exile, an anti-fascist and the creator of a sparse yet singular body of work located well outside the canon led to her being erased from the history of cinema.

A Recovered Film

During the seminar that Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola is organising on the life and work of Rosina Prado, Susel Legón, Alexandre Kröner and Nita Kruger Hidalgo, all students on the Film Preservation Studies Master’s degree, will present the new digitised version of El ir y venir de los trenes, which was completed this year at the school. The short film was preserved from a 35mm release print deposited by Rosina Prado herself at the Spanish Film Archive. The original negatives from which this print was made have not been found in either Cuba or the Russian Federation, making it the only surviving film element of the work to have been discovered to date.

The seminar will also feature Masha Salazkina (Concordia University, Montreal), who will present her research on film studies at VGIK during the period in which Rosina shot the film, and Sonia García López (Carlos III University of Madrid, UC3M) and Carolina Cappa (EQZE) will present their research on the filmmaker. They will also talk about the importance of student films, which are often overlooked in the field of film heritage preservation. They will also be joined by Pedro Sevil Prado, the filmmaker’s son, and Gonzalo Barrena, vice-president of the Niños de Rusia Association, who will provide family testimonies and some historical context regarding the Spanish children who were exiled in the USSR.

The research project of which this seminar forms part is being carried out in collaboration with the Spanish Film Archive, the Basque Film Archive, the UC3M University Institute of Spanish Cinema and the Prado-Sevil family, with documentary support from the Historical Archive of the Communist Party of Spain, the National Archive of Catalonia and the Niños de Rusia Association.

The seminar, entitled ‘Rosina Prado, Filmmaker in Exile’, will take place on Tuesday, 9 June at 17:00, at the EQZE cinema (Tabakalera building, ground floor).