Skip to main content
Marco, the Invented Truth film image; man gestures in front of chalk board

Marco, the Invented Truth

Marco, la verdad inventada

Panorama

This event has passed

North American Premiere

Barcelona, 2005. Enric Marco (Eduard Fernández) has built his reputation on the claim of being a Holocaust survivor. A charismatic speaker, and chairman of a survivors’ association representing the 9,000 Spanish deportees who were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps during WWII, he is slated to speak before the Spanish prime minister at a Holocaust memorial service. But as the date approaches, a historian uncovers inconsistencies in Marco’s life story, leading to greater implications: in truth, Marco was never imprisoned in the Flossenbürg concentration camp, as he so claimed. He fabricated his own backstory.

This riveting biographical thriller by Aitor Arregi and Jon Garaño (whose past collaborations include Spain’s Oscar entries The Endless Trench and Flowers) deploys time skips to dramatize the inception and unmasking of Marco’s persona. Propelled by a fantastic original score by Aránzazu Calleja, the film’s crisp, dynamic cinematography evokes, at key moments, the vertigo of a great upheaval. A tense depiction of the personal and national devastation wrought by one man’s falsehoods.

 

Community Partner

Directors
Cast

Eduard Fernández, Nathalie Poza

Credits
Country of Origin

Spain

Year

2024

Language

In Spanish, Catalan and English with English subtitles

Film Contact
Links
18+
108 min
Human Rights & Social Justice
Irusoin, Moriarti Produkzioak, Atresmedia Cine, Bteam Pictures

Book Tickets

This event has passed.

Credits & Director

Producer

Ander Barinaga-Rementeria, Xabier Berzosa, Jaime Ortiz de Artiñano, Ander Sagardoy

Screenwriter

Aitor Arregi, Jon Garaño, Jorge Gil Munarriz, Jose Mari Goenaga

Cinematography

Javier Agirre

Editor

Maialen Sarasua Oliden

Art Director

Mikel Serrano

Aitor Arregi & Jon Garaño headshot; Marco, The Invented Truth co-directors

Aitor Arregi and Jon Garaño are directors and screenwriters who have been working together for over 20 years through their production company Moriarti, alongside Jose Mari Goenaga. Moriarti was founded in 2001, and since then they have produced five feature films, three cinematic documentaries, over a dozen short films, several television documentaries, and a series for Disney+.

Filmography: Sahara Marathon (2004); The Giant (2017); The Endless Trench (2019)

Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre

Georgia O'Keeffe: the Brightness of Light
Georgia O’Keeffe: The Brightness of Light film image; painted reds, pinks, oranges, and yellows that combine to look like a flower

Georgia O'Keeffe: the Brightness of Light

Dir. Paul Wagner
118 min

Drawing on her copious correspondence and the world's leading scholars, this is a definitive documentary on the life and work of "the mother of American Modernism."

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Shall We Dance?

Dir. Masayuki Suô
137 min

Masayuki Suô's delightful and charming 1996 film was a box office smash and won 14 Japanese Academy Awards including Best Film. It's the story of a married salaryman who falls in love with... dance.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
Drop Dead City
Drop Dead City film image; someone holding a newspaper up in front of a brick wall

Drop Dead City

Dir. Michael Rohatyn & Peter Yost
108 min

New York, 1975. The city is minutes away from bankruptcy and President Gerald Ford wants no part of it. Sanitation workers are on strike and cops are telling tourists it's not safe to visit. The town is going up in flames and they can't pay the firemen.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Inedia

Dir. Liz Cairns
107 min

Liz Cairns makes a mesmerizing feature debut that sees a young woman suffering from mysterious food allergies join a remote island community practicing alternative healing methods. She soon realizes that not everything is as it seems.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
The Fugitive Kind
The Fugitive Kind film image; woman sits behind a brooding man with a guitar

The Fugitive Kind

Dir. Sidney Lumet
121 min

Sidney Lumet's movie brings together two of the greatest actors of the period, Brando and Anna Magnani, reason enough to check out this underrated poetical drama about a handsome musician who washes up in a small southern town.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Jimi James: Blues for Brando

Dir. Laszlo Benedek
140 min

The Jimi James Quintet pays tribute to the emergence of bebop, in many ways a parallel artistic innovation to Method acting. A set of bebop classics will be followed by a screening of Marlon Brando in The Wild One.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema