They locate fragments of a film where Lorca is seen traveling by car with his theater company

BarcelonaSome images stubbornly survive the passage of time. Federico García Lorca, one of the most important Spanish-language poets of the 20th century, was murdered in August 1936 by a firing squad of soldiers from the Francoist side and buried so that no one would ever find him again. Today, however, we can see his face again, with perfect clarity, in a 1920s car, climbing a mountain. He is in the back seat with other people. The images could be from 1932, and he was traveling with the legendary theater company La Barraca. It is one of the few moving images of one of the great exponents of the Generation of '27 and an internationally renowned author.

The images were already known, but those that were circulated were copies, and it was impossible to recognize the poet's face. The original film, with some previously unseen sequences, was discovered by filmmaker Manuel Menchón while preparing his documentary. The broken voiceFor the film, which will premiere next year, the director researched and found this previously unseen material in the Menéndez-Pidal family's private archive, which has been restored and broadcast by RTVE. It was inside a tin of shoe polish. "When we opened the tin of photochemical, which dated back to the 1920s, and saw Federico's face looking at us, I got chills," Menchón explains in an interview with Carlos del Amor. Newscast from TVE. "With the technology of 2025 and the ability to digitize it at 6K or 4K, you discover a completely different image from the raw material," he adds. The Menéndez Pidal family archive is quite vast: it contains documentation dating back to the 19th century. The historian Gonzalo Menéndez Pidal (Madrid, 1911-2008) accompanied La Barraca on several occasions, and in fact, some photographs were already known showing him filming Lorca and his companions. "We have found much more unpublished material," says journalist Víctor Fernández, who is part of the Menchón documentary team.

The Unsolved Enigma

The place where Lorca's tomb is located It remains an enigma, despite the various excavations that have been carried out.A leading figure of the Generation of '27 and an internationally renowned author since the early 1930s, his assassination cut short a prolific and versatile body of work. He published books of poems such as Gypsy Ballads and plays such as The House of Bernarda Alba And he remains one of the emblematic authors of the 20th century.

Lorca was murdered between the neighboring towns of Víznar and Alfacar when he was 38 years old. It is believed that Dióscoro Galindo, a teacher, and the bullfighters Francisco Galadí and Joaquín Arcollas are buried with him. In Víznar, 19 mass graves were located, and the remains of 166 people were recovered. These include 125 men, 40 women, and one person exhumed in the 1970s whose sex could not be determined. The site, designated as a Site of Memory of Andalusia, has a monolith that reads: "We were all Lorca."