Cuéntame cómo pasó et Conta-me como foi : les dictatures ibériques à travers le regard des petits « Carlitos »

• Main Author: Cécile Gonçalves
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Groupe de Recherche Identités et Cultures 2020-06-01
• Series: TV Series
• Subjects: Spain; Portugal; Francoism; Salazarism; democratic transition; memory
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/tvseries/4092

The Spanish TV series Cuéntame cómo pasó has undergone many adaptations around the world, notably in Portugal with Conta-me como foi. Cuéntame and Conta-me offer viewers an immersion in the daily life of Spanish and Portuguese during the last years of the Iberian authoritarian regimes and their democratic transition through the eyes of an 8-year-old child. The various technical processes used in the production (inlaying the characters in archive images and other documents of the period) confer the « old-fashioned charm » of historical documents. Drawing on numerous period sources (amateur films, reports, audio recordings from the archives of national public channels), which they integrate into their narrative framework and which mobilize certain narrative mechanisms (the children’s viewpoint, the possibilities offered by intertextuality and the central place held by television in the narrative), our series build a harmless and anachronistic account of the dictatorial past of the two countries of the Iberian Peninsula, which is full of nostalgia, of « saudade ».