“It’s surreal, isn’t it?” Kristina, one of the organizers of the Chimenea de Villaverde Latin American film festival, told me a few weeks ago. She was referring to the fact that the festival takes place in a multiplex in a shopping centre in the outskirts of Madrid where the image that greets you as you go in is a poster for something called “Kung Fu Panda” which I’ll probably have to see at some stage – five-year old son and all that. But once you’re in Sala 2, you’re watching a different kind of film altogether. Last night it was “Oriundos de la noche”, a Javier Balaguer documentary about the Trujillo regime in Santo Domingo, during the years when Santo Domingo was called “Ciudad Trujillo” – not that the dictator had a big ego or anything. The film full of evocative poetry by Pedro Mir but also tells the awful story of the beautiful Mirabal sisters, three of whom, Patria, Minerva (that's Minerva in the photo), and Maria Teresa, along with their driver Rufino de la Cruz, were clubbed to death by Trujillo’s henchmen on the outskirts of Puerto Plata on November 25, 1960. (The last Mirabal sister, Dede, is still alive and is interviewed for the film.) There’s nothing new in “Oriundos” if you’ve read Mario Vargas Llosa’s masterpiece “La fiesta del chivo”, but these are the kinds of historical episodes that we need to be reminded of every so often, lest we forget.

Now back to “Kung Fu Panda”...