Forgetting is a burdensome task; the act is taxing, demanding more than you can possibly offer. More so, if it is linked with the sense of sight, where each detail of a particular event functions like muscle memory, eternally worn on your sleeve, and recalled promptly. I have often been fascinated by memory; the idea of reliving the moment, however differently you remember it, each time.
If that is the case, I wonder, how do the children, whose teacher promised them the sea, ever forget and forgive the brutal murder of their promise and hope at the hands of the state machinery? How do they try to erase the last, painful sight within their minds, one that is not only omnipresent but also haunting, long after it is gone? How do we come back to the world of The Teacher Who Promised the Sea (Patricia Font, 2023) without cursing the unfortunate fate that memory brings along?
I stumbled upon The Teacher Who Promised the Sea a few days back and was engulfed in the optimism and hope that it promised, right from the beginning, much like Antoni Benaiges’ (Enric Auquer) promise to his students. At the same time, I was also taken aback by my naive expectation, and then the realisation that the hope and promise are here, but extremely transient. It can slip at any moment, or worse, when our state institutions would desire or feel burdened by its goodness.
Set against the Spanish Civil War, the film is a non-linear narrative of Ariana (Laia Costa), who seeks to find the last remains of her great-grandfather, Bernardo, only to let her grandfather, Carlos (Felipe García Vélez), survive for a little longer. As she sets out on a journey, what follows is a revelation of memory, trauma, and violence. At the heart of it? A charismatic teacher, Antoni, who follows unconventional methods of teaching, involving music, dance, magic, and writing, drastically changes the world of his students.
The film hopes against hope. When the power play and war between the Republicans and Nationalists might represent the present, the children stand for all that is yet to come: innocence, inquisitiveness, and imagination. Antoni would rightly want his “pupils who have to learn to be children first,” and therefore promises them the sea, which, much like his students, represents all that is calm, vast and insightful, existing effortlessly.
The film, in its 1-hour and 45-minute-long universe, showcases a world inhabited by love against hate, hope against the dark, and promise against the deception of the state. It represents a world free of religion, law, and violence, and yet, constructs a human world, which is free and expressive at a time when freedom of expression and speech came difficult in Spain, and even the world lying outside of it.
The imagined world of the film collapses all restrictions of religious orthodoxy and state bureaucracy that function for civilians. Instead, a tiny school run by a single teacher and attended by around 10 students imagines what the outside world could not: learning to be free, curious and learned individuals who would grow up to be not police, militants, or the army, but poets, writers, singers, and magicians.
The state and the church, which Louis Althusser defines as Repressive State Apparatus (RSA), as institutions exercising coercive force to maintain the power of the ruling class over subordinate classes, function and punish the teacher, and by extension, his students. How free is the teacher and the school as a counter-state institution remains an important yet open-ended question in the film. For me, hope does not end with the brutal murder of the teacher. Instead, hope lives on. Hope lives through the many students Antoni leaves behind, people who dared to imagine and dream. It lives on with all his ideals, the opening up of a world within a world for his students and, by extension, the audience.
Towards the end, as Carlos sits with his granddaughter and his family, facing the sea, it raises a question in my mind: How many of his students got to see the sea at all? If not Antoni, his promise lingers. Everybody exists but he. He is the absent-present whose goodness and promise haunt his students and the audience, long after he is gone.
The film ties several bonds together within the family at the centre of it, and yet dives deep into the individual psyche and the sight of violence as imprinted in the minds of the children. It leaves the audience with a range of questions, including those concerning innocence versus violence, individual versus the state, orthodox religion versus atheism, and public versus private.
As Ariana searches for the body of her great-grandfather and the history of the teacher killed, the film comments on the disappearance of bodies, the politics of the corporeality of them, and the emotional, strenuous and burdened task of forgetting for those who are left behind. It does not offer easy answers, but leaves you thinking about the range of freedoms the world is capable of providing and nurturing, but would often be limited by the incapabilities of the state and religion as a repressive and coercive order.
The film opens up newer possibilities for me; it allowed me to hope when all that could be done was everything but to hope. It made me cry like a baby, but also think of larger questions around the idea of suppression and resistant voices, who are always brave enough to stand up but also not to run away when the repercussions hit them. Antoni opened up worlds for me where I can think, rationalise and dream freely. He asked me to learn by experimentation and never let the regimentation of any kind dictate whatever I wish to do.
Having said this, the film is an ode to living and dreaming in a world constantly negated by the state of some or the other kind. Where and how do we find our spaces within remains an interesting question. Thus, more than a burden, the film comes as a warm hug for me, where it demands all of your emotions to be compressed but still felt and channelised in a short period of time. Till then, I will be living a little freely and dreaming bravely because Antoni Benaiges, somewhere, does exist; alive, imaginative, and beautiful.
Zainab is the writer of the column Frames of Return, a space that explores how films, when told through the right lens, capture our very essence and give voice to resistant stories.