Winnipeg, Seeds of Hope

Directed by Elio Quiroga and Beñat Beitia

At the end of the Spanish Civil War, almost half a million people moved by fear of reprisals to France. A hundred thousand of them were children. The French Government overflowed by the human avalanche, put them in improvised refugee camps. Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, former consul in Spain before the war, convinced the President of Chile to save more than two thousand refugees. The film tells the story of Julia, a little girl that escapes Barcelona with his father, a young widower. They embarked on the Winnipeg, a ship chartered by Neruda. That saved them from a dark future in Europe. Now, she is “a daughter of Neruda”, as the descendants of the 2,200 refugees call themselves.