Spanish History in The Fairy Country: Dealing with Social Trauma in Pan's Labyrinth

The successful film El laberinto del fauno (Del Toro, 2006) presents a fairy tale set in the convulsive times of the Spanish Civil War's aftermath. The scholarship on this film already established the difficulties inherent in evaluating the conflictive relation between history and fantasy in the movie's ambiguous happy ending and has tried to relate the film's moral with the social trauma of the Civil War. In this essay, we chose to read the film in the light of another social trauma, that which marked the moment of its production. Considering that the Transition from a fascist dictatorship to a parliamentary monarchy has not been openly and peacefully discussed in the subsequent decades, and that a tense silence in regards to this topic continues to this very day, it is possible to understand the movie as an attempt to address some unfinished business in contemporary Spanish culture.