Catalan Marc Marginedas, kidnapped by ISIS, returns to hell ‘Return to Raqqa’

To remind you of an event that shook our country even though it took place thousands of kilometers away, it is the most famous kidnapping by the Islamic State of twenty international journalists and collaborators, including the El Periódico correspondent. Iberian Press Group, Marc Marginedas, ‘Nits sense ficció’ premieres this month on Tuesday the 7th (22:05). ‘Return to Raqqa’ documentary. Journalist in this Albert Sole He travels with Marginedas to relive the nightmare Marginedas experienced with 19 of his friends (15 men and 4 women). daily beatings and death threats. Six of them could not say this because they were executed. One did not return.

A work by Albert Solé

This documentary produced by Minimal Films and co-produced by 3Cat Albert Solé and Raúl Cuevas, The work chronicles how the Catalan journalist lived in captivity after he was kidnapped in Syria on September 3, 2013. The El Periódico reporter and conflict zones ambassador has not returned to the country where he lived that nightmare since his death. Broadcast in March 2014.

It took several years and a repositioning of his mind before he accepted the offer of journalist Albert Solé, director of the documentary and author of works such as the following. ‘Bucharest, lost memory’ (conducting a personal research in memory of himself and his father, politician Jordi Solé Tura, one of the drafters of the Constitution, who died in 2009) The best documentary film award was given to Goya. Although he also has two Gaudí awards, four Biznaga awards from the Malaga Festival and various awards in other international competitions.

‘Return to Raqqa’ award Panorama Award to DocsValència This year also demonstrates the documentary value of the testimonies, the moderation in the narrative style and the success in the selection of audiovisual sources put at the service of history: Efforts of El Periódico family and colleagues to contact the kidnappers and get help returning him home.

To reconstruct their ordeal, illustrations and animations are used to recreate the ill-treatment, humiliation, fear and helplessness that marked the hours spent between the walls of the three buildings they lived in, which were converted into prisons. He finds the journalist in one of them Javier Espinosa and photojournalist Ricard Garcia Vilanova, was also kidnapped. And there they find the Beatles, the nickname given to four British-born ISIS fighters known for their extreme cruelty.

In the hands of psychopaths

“Returning to Syria will allow me to close this chapter of my life and face the ghosts of the past“, says Marginedas. “A senior jihadist commander said to me a sentence I will never forget: ‘You’ve been here twice (I’ve previously covered the conflict in the country). “It was good for you, but this time we will kill you,” he says. “They enjoyed seeing people suffer. Now it’s clear to me There are movie psychopaths. really,” he says.

“There were imaginary executions by holding a gun to the head and a knife to the neck. They were very cruel,” Espinosa recalls. Marginedas was the first to be released. They left him in a field near the Turkish border. Espinosa, Garcia Planas and the nine other abductees were later released. Those of American or British nationality were executed. Apart from John Cantlie, an ISIS propagandist, no further news was received from him.

“to be at the same time informer and hero “It made me see things that I would never see,” Marginedas said in an interview with El Periódico after returning from this trip, in which he described how he experienced that difficult period of his life. “In the hospital in Aleppo, where I stayed for a month, there were some blankets and a bottle of water on the floor, and I said to myself: This is what I need to be happy about. according to me happiness is a personal decision“He is,” he assured.

He expressed his feelings about that trip shown in ‘Return to Raqqa’ as follows: “I felt something similar to what a survivor of a German concentration camp experienced. But it wasn’t therapy – I pursued it privately for a year – it was more of a way to show it to the public. a never ending storywith”.