Irialak documentary explores discovery of Civil War victim

The documentary film ‘Irialak’ (Septiembres) explores the personal discovery of director Izaskun Arandia regarding her great-grandfather, Miguel Barga. For 80 years, the family believed Barga had simply died during the Spanish Civil War in 1936.

Following a 2018 notification from the Aranzadi Foundation and the Basque Government, DNA profiles matched Barga to a corpse exhumed in 2009 from a mass grave in Rabanera del Pinar. Arandia’s three-year investigation involved gathering testimonies and documents across the province of Burgos to reconstruct the history of her ancestor and the events of the summer of 1936.