"Bolivar" pays tribute to fight for independence

The new Columbian film Bolivar: Fragments of a dream deals with Latin America's fight for independence 200 years ago. In the left-liberal daily El Periódico de Catalunya writer Olga Merina describes her thoughts after watching the film at its screening at the Grec Festival in Barcelona: "In the tropical dawn, walking down the Montjuïc hill to Parallel metro station, I reflected on how little interest this anniversary [of 200 years of independence in Latin America] has provoked on this side of the big pond and how little we were taught at school about how the nations of the new world freed themselves from the deadly fangs of a stepmother called Spain. The schoolbooks explained the whole affair with one sentence: Simón Bolivar in the north and St. Martín in the south. And instead of the word independence they used the term emancipation, which connotes a somewhat paternalistic attitude."

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