A documentary rescues from oblivion the photographer who challenged dictator Trujillo

Santo Domingo,La 40’s Photographer‘, which will premiere this Wednesday in the Dominican Republic, saves the story of Pedro Aníbal Fuentes BergWho challenged the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina (1930–1961) and, camera in hand, captured the horrors experienced by the dictator’s opponents in prison.

Written and directed by Erica Santelises and Orlando Barria, ‘El Fotografia de la 40’, 76 minutes long, premieres within the Global Film Festival, where it competes in the Documentary First Feature category.

In 1959, two years before Trujillo’s assassination, Fuentes Berg was forced by officials of La 40, the secret prison that was the maximum expression of the dictatorship’s repression, to photograph prisoners as they tortured them in the electric chair. Went.

Witness to those horrors, the photographer, who was 32 years old at the time, together with his brother Gilberto, who worked at a Dominican aviation company, managed to send copies of the images abroad and inform the Dominican exiles and the community. By the Trujillo regime.

One of those snapshots is of Trujilloista opponent José Meson, who was horrifically imprisoned in the electric chair and whose image became a symbol of the fight against the dictatorship that ended with Trujillo’s assassination on May 30, 1961.

It was actually Mason’s photograph hanging in the Museum of Dignity that years ago caught the attention of Chilean photographers Erica Santelis and Orlando Barea, who in 2018 began creating ‘El Fotografia de la 40’, which tells the story of Pedro takes it forward. Aníbal Fuentes Berg was murdered along with his brother after being arrested on January 20, 1960.

Mason’s photograph has been widely circulated at home and abroad, but little is known about its author.

Importance of preserving history

Santelises and Barria, who have lived in the Dominican Republic for more than two decades, tell EFE that they began researching the story of Pedro Aníbal and, in theory, had the idea of ​​making a short film specifically for colleagues. but ultimately decided to make his first feature documentary.

“We consider photography as a document and, in this context, Pedro Aníbal Fuentes Berg and La 40 prison become evidence of truth within the framework of the dictatorship”, says Santelises.

Produced by Fernando Santos Díaz and with music by maestro Manuel Tejada, ‘El Photographia de la 40’ is not only a tribute to the defiant Dominican photographer, but also a call to preserve history, according to photojournalists who, before, only were unclear. Answer: “Most people they asked about Pedro Aníbal.

This was a reflection of how unknown Pedro Aníbal was to the average Dominican.

For Barria, who works as a photojournalist at the EFE agency, one of the most emotional moments of making the documentary was opening the letters sent by Fuentes Berg, winner of the annual public competition of the Film Promotion Fund (FONPROCEN). To his children and he kept it unread for decades.

“They were love letters, advice, very intimate things,” Barria explains.

In fact, the work also includes testimony from Fuentes Berg’s children Gladys and Gustavo Fuentes, as well as Jose Mason’s daughter Darlene Mason.

This evidence is linked to the story of the anti-Trujillo fighter Delio Gómez Ochoa or Julio Escoto, whom Fuentes Berg photographed in La 40.

The filming of ‘El Fotografia de la 40’ began to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the murder of the Fuentes Berg brothers and the naming of a street after the duo by the Office of the Mayor of the National District (centre) in December 2020. of the Dominican capital), who then admitted that both had remained anonymous.

The intention of bringing it to cinema is that “people know this part of history, which is not only the history of a photographer, but also of a country,” Baria insists.