Villar – Manuela’s Children is based on an unusual story deriving from the artist’s own family, which was split up during the Spanish Civil War and only reunited by chance many years later.
Villar – Manuela’s Children is presented on a single screen and is structured as an interactive documentary, in which 4 siblings tell about their lives from 1934 to today, with a chief focus on the Spanish Civil War and the 1960s. Besides the four main tracks there are sequences that cast light on the family’s common starting-point, the small Spanish village of Villar del Cobo near Teruel.
This visual art documentary combines elements from the cinema’s linear narrative with the interactive possibilities of the digital format. The user can move freely among the narrators, follow a single person continuously, make random swoops or repeat individual sequences.
The length of the work will vary according to the selected sequences. The total length is 190 minutes.
Villar – Manuela’s Children was produced with support from the Danish Film Institute and is their first interactive documentary publication.
Published for the second time in 2007 by Gyldendal as material for upper secondary Spanish teaching by Eva Rosenkilde and Eva Koch.
The project has been upgraded by Presentationsdesign Stockholm AB in 2018, supported by CAB.
