Las noches de Tefía

Between 1954 and 1966, in a desert area of the Spanish island of Fuerteventura, there was a concentration camp created by the Franco regime, known by the euphemistic name of Colonia Agrícola Penitenciaria de Tefía. It was one of the many places to which the regime sent those sentenced under the so-called Vagrants and Thugs Law, which from 1954 was extended to include homosexuals.

In 2004, Airam Betancor, one of those homosexual prisoners, was forced to recall the seventeen months of forced labour he endured in the camp when he was barely twenty years old. The investigations of a documentary filmmaker, who is trying to give a voice to the prison’s history of silence, force Airam into a painful exercise of memory that will cause many problems in his life. The mind-numbing recollection of the terrible life in the camp mixes with the stories improvised at night by one of his fellow prisoners to alleviate his misery. Charli, the fantastic storyteller, invented for them all El Tindaya, a dazzling music hall where everyone has their alter ego. A space of freedom where, as the welcome song says, the boundaries of the possible are broken by imagination.