El peón

Stockholm, winter 1962. Two men from opposite worlds face each other on a chessboard. Arturo Pomar, the post-war prodigy who now works as a postal worker in Ciempozuelos, faces his last great sporting opportunity against a young, eccentric and ambitious American: Bobby Fischer. One was a pawn of the Franco regime; the other will be from the Cold War. With this game and its opponents as the guiding thread, El peón covers the lives of numerous "pawns" dedicated to a political cause in Franco's Spain or in the United States of Kennedy in that convulsive 1962. Communists, maquis, workers, socialists, ETA members , Christians, Republicans, students or Falangists; African Americans, pacifists, indigenous people, anti-nuclear activists, leftists or blindly obedient military. People who sacrificed themselves before the dictatorship or capitalism paying a price of death, jail, exile or loneliness. Like a collage structured in the 77 movements of the Fischer-Pomar game, Paco Cerdà weaves an original story about personal commitment, chess and power to reflect on two questions: what does History in capital letters with the lives of tiny people, and how individual sacrifice explains collective struggles.