January 19, 2017
Thirteen Among a
Thousand (Trece Entre Mil) – Spain, 2005
On the day I sat down to watch Inaki Arteta’s 2005
documentary Thirteen Among a Thousand,
four Israelis died in a suspected terrorist attack. A day earlier, there had
been a shooting at an airport in Florida which left five people dead and six
injured; over the same two days, news feeds brought multiple reports of carnage
in Syria, as well as suicide bombings in both Iraq and Turkey. Death, it seems,
is everywhere, yet all too often the frequency of attacks and the constant
focus on the number of deaths can have a numbing effect on those not directly
affected by the attacks, so much so that reports on terrorism can be broken
away from in the name of advertising dollars without viewers even stopping to
think about the implications of a society that is able to go from a report on a
deadly bomb attack to the latest automobile commercial without any difficulty
whatsoever. I was partly drawn to Thirteen
Among a Thousand as a way of forcing myself to combat this mental
passivity, for when you recognize the fact the numbers are desensitizing you to
the very things you should be irate about, it’s necessary to do something about
it.
The subject of Thirteen
Among a Thousand also intrigued me. ETA is an organization that I had heard
about in news reports, yet the reports were almost always on tragic events that
had just happened; they rarely focused about the individuals affected by those
events. In a way, I understand this. The news is immediate; it is sensational.
For many, a story about how someone is doing ten years after a family member
was assassinated simply does not carry the same sense of urgency. Perhaps it
should.
Wisely, Thirteen Among
a Thousand is not a historical documentary. It does not begin by explaining
the origins of ETA or try to explain the group’s politics or aims. Its stated
goal is to show viewers how terrorism affects individuals and families, and it
accomplishes this by focusing on thirteen families, all of whom lost someone -
in some cases more than one person - in the struggle with ETA. Through their
stories, I imagine, it is hoped that people will be able to put a name to a number
and not forget about the people that are left behind after the media moves on
to the next news item. The film asks us to linger a bit longer and to recognize
that pain does not always go away.
The film give us ample evidence of this. Parents whose loved
ones were needlessly taken from them at a young age. Spouses whose partners
never made it home from such innocuous places as supermarkets. Children who
watched a parent’s assassination. I could go on. The film shows viewers
archival footage from news reports and then switches to the present, and we see
that the survivors have not moved on. In two of the accounts, the families
speak of the dead in the present tense. As emotional as this part is, another
aspect of the film is equally horrifying. In almost all of these cases, justice
remains elusive. Time and again, we hear testimony that the guilty remain free.
Some are celebrated as heroes; one even works at the school of a survivor’s
child. And then there are the whispers, the outrageous oft-repeated implication
that the victims must have done something to deserve their fate.
To watch Thirteen
Among a Thousand is to be reminded of mankind’s potential for cruelty. It
is also to be reminded of the power of community. At times, the only support
the survivors get is from fellow survivors, as long-time friends fade from the
picture, perhaps as a result of not having any more empathy to give. There was
not a moment of the film that was neither moving nor infuriating. In fact, my
only complaint, other than the film’s overly optimistic ending, which took away
from the film’s established tone, is that I wanted to hear more from some of
the people featured in the documentary. That sentiment seems a bit selfish in
retrospect, but it speaks to the power of the testimony contained in the film.
According to Wikipedia, it has now been five years since
ETA’s last attack, so there is cause for guarded optimism. In circumstances
like this, it is all too easy for documentaries like this to be kicked to the
curb, as if they were no longer relevant. After all, focusing on past pain can
sometimes be seen as impeding future progress. However, films like Thirteen Among a Thousand have a weight
that transcends the specific horrors they depict. They shed a light on the
experiences of so many other people around the world, of widows and orphans in
Iraq, parents in Israel and Palestine, and classmates of victims of school
shootings in the United States. Pain and sorrow are universal, and every now
and then we need to be reminded of this. Thirteen
Among a Thousand does that exceptionally well. (on DVD in Region 2)
3 and a half stars
*Thirteen Among a
Thousand is in Spanish with English subtitles.
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