26/02/2020 | Barcelona | Activities > Public diplomacy
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On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Manila, Casa Asia presents the documentary “From Allies to Massacred. The Last of the Philippines ”directed by Ramon Vilaró and produced by Cristina Gibert. This documentary tells the story of the Spanish colony in the Philippines under Japanese occupation during World War II.

They are direct testimonies of several survivors who went from allies to massacred, to the swing of the alliance between Franco’s Spain and imperialist Japan. In February 1945, during the Battle of Manila, 257 Spaniards were stabbed with bayonets by Japanese soldiers, or under American bombs, in a blood orgy that left more than 100,000 dead in less than a month.

The Last of the Philippines is the name given to the heroic feat of 57 Spanish soldiers who in 1898, for eleven months, resisted in the fort of the town of Baler, after capitulation to the United States troops after more than three centuries of Spanish colonization. Many Spanish families continued in the Philippines, coexisting without problems with the new situation in which the Philippines remained as a state associated to the United States. The General Tobacco Company of the Philippines, founded by the Marquis of Comillas, was the main core of the Spanish presence in the Philippines.

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) created a first fracture in the Spanish-Philippine colony between supporters of the Republic and those who supported the Francoists. During World War II, in 1941, the Japanese invaded the Philippine archipelago. The Spanish were protected as allies, due to the alliance pact between Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperialist Japan, which Francoist Spain secretly joined. But, in the end they suffered the pain of the war, hundreds of them falling, blood and fire, in the massacre carried out by the Japanese in the Battle of Manila. They went from allied to massacred. Anna María Aguilella, was a six-year-old girl, and was the only survivor when Japanese troops bayonet stabbed 67 people at the Spanish Consulate in Manila.

Presentation by:
Rafael Bueno, Director of Politics, Society and Educational Programmes

Roundtable by:
Ramón Vilaró, is a journalist and writer. For more than twenty years he has been a correspondent in Brussels, Washington and Tokyo, most of the time for the newspaper El País. The result of this experience are the EE.UU., más allá de la hamburguesa y los pantalones vaqueros (1984); Japón, más allá del video y de las geishas (1988); Nova York i Washington (1994); Gringolandia, un retrato de EE.UU. y su relación con España (2004), i Sol naciente, historias hispano-japonesas (2011). He is the author of the following historic novels Dainichi, la epopeya de Francisco Javier en Japón (2001), Tabaco, el imperio de los marqueses de Comillas (2003) and La última conquista (2005). He has written and directed documentaries for television, among others De aliados a masacrados, los últimos de Filipinas. Currently he alternates the office of scribe with chronicles and opinion columns in different media, among which we highlightCambio16.

26/02/2020

Wednesday, 26th of February 2020 at 7.00pm.
Registration closed.

Casal Barri La Llacuna
c/ Bolívia, 49
Barcelona

Free admission with limited capacity.

Casa Asia