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What could a child know of the Spanish Civil War? What could they know about the POUM, the  International Brigade, the Friends of Durruti, and the Communist International? Not the specifics of course. But children must have heard the sounds. They must have seen the soldiers. Maybe our hypothetical child felt a current in the air - something indescribable - when Franco announced his victory. Victor Erice's masterpiece almost didn't make it out of Spain. The film was completed two years before Franco died and had to pass through various censors. Despite the depiction of an anti-fascist soldier (supposedly the first sympathetic depiction of the Francoist opposition since the civil war), The Spirit of the Beehive was released to the world unscathed. According to Erice, who was given access to notes written by the censors, the authorities found the film slow and boring and doubted its ability to draw an audience. Such are the contingencies of history. Today, The Spirit of the B

Antonio Gramsci was born in a small town on the island of Sardina, part of the then Kingdom of Italy. He is perhaps best known for his work within the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and devotion to the revolutionary cause in the face of Mussolini's fascist terror.  Spanning some 3,000 pages, his Prison Notebooks are a feat of immense strength in the face of his (soon-to-be fatal) carceral conditions, and his works continue to serve as a source of knowledge and inspiration for contemporary Communist movements. Gramsci's greatness will be forever embodied in the words of a fascist prosecutor: "For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning." The documentary film Gramsci 44 ( available here ) details the life of the titular Italian during a little-known period of his life: the brief captivity on the island of Utica, prior to his much longer imprisonment in Rome. In 1926, Gramsci was sentenced to a five-year term on the tiny island along with several other