"The Last Coal Miners of Spain"

"Coal is on the way out in Europe, and it is dying a slow and ugly death. Its decline has been hastened by competition from the renewable-energy industry, cheaper imported coal from Russia and the United States and new air-quality regulations passed by the European Union. 

The death throes have been especially violent in Spain, where the national coal-mining industry was created by royal order in 1621 to exploit the coal basin at Villanueva del Rio y Minas in Seville. In 1990, 167 coal mines employed about 40,000 workers. Today there are roughly 40 active mines, employing fewer than 4,000 miners. The struggling industry has long been supported by state subsidies..."

Read more from source at the New York Times here.

Claude Lanzmann and "The Last of the Unjust" in Seville

Lanzmann, left, with Benjamin Murmelstein in 1975, in a still from The Last of the Unjust

French producer-director Claude Lanzmann, author of the singularly penetrating memoir “The Patagonian Hare” visited Seville this week.

As the creator of Shoah, the 9-hour documentary (which was the result of over ten years of research and filming testimonies of survivors from the Nazi's extermination of Jews across Europe) Lanzmann was honoured yesterday at the Andalucian city's film festival.

His new movie is titled “The Last of the Unjust.” It is about Benjamin Murmelstein, the Jewish Council president in Theresienstadt ghetto, the concentration camp in the city of Terezín (in the modern-day Czech Republic.) who collaborated with the Nazis, a man who Lanzmann said he actually “grew to love.”

“The Last of the Unjust” will be released in Spain on January 10.