I have seen the film "There be dragons-Encontrarás dragones". Apart from the big ideas (hatred and forgiveness, love and pain) I think there are two very specific issues that are particularly sensitive for the audience: Josemaría Escrivá is one; the civil war, the other.

I like cinema. I am not a connoisseur, I just consider myself a simple spectator. My professional dedication is to history, and I would like to draw attention to three moments in the film and a small anecdote in the script.

As a simple spectator I am saturated with the civil war and Hispanic cinema. It goes without saying that my whole family was on the Republican side and that has been the historical report that I have breathed. That's why I was lazy to watch "You'll find dragons"... again the war.

But I liked it. It seemed to me neither black nor white, but quite the opposite. And here are the three moments that make it clear:

The first is a sequence that takes place in the last throes of the republic. An assault on a Madrid church. Josemaría flees taking the Blessed Sacrament with him. The rioters follow him to the subway and surround him, threatening, while the convoy arrives. He was saved at the last moment because the guard of the carriage confronted the attackers. Once safe, inside the train, the same man confronts Josemaría: that disguise (the cassock) is no longer going to serve you. He is a republican, he is anticlerical, probably also a socialist, communist or anarchist. But he is - fundamentally and above all - an honest man. Real life at that time was full of this subject of people.

The second moment is a scene where the civil conflict has already broken out, although it is still the first skirmishes. A group of militiamen kill a priest in the street bringing out all the hatred they carry inside. The slaughter of priests, nuns, bishops and ordinary Catholics for the mere fact of being Catholics is a fact goal of the Spanish Civil War. Libraries are full of books. One only needs to read them.

The third moment is a sequence where Josemaría and a friend flee from their pursuers and enter a neighbor's courtyard. A humble woman brings them into her house and spurs her slacker son, still sleeping, to hide them. He resists (if they were found, they would all risk their lives), but ends up giving in. The young militiamen are emboldened, the man seems cornered but remains cool. They demand his papers and... it turns out that he is a captain in the Republican army. The pursuers vanish. The persecuted come out of their hole. Like many others, the Republican captain has fallen where the war has touched him. He must not be very convinced of either one or the other. But neither does he feel like being killed for saving anyone. However, faced with the possibility of the certain murder of two defenseless people, in an extreme status , the moral judgment of his conscience is impeccable.

I think in "You Will Find Dragons" we are in the framework of a war observing the moral decisions of individual people. Always complex. This is what I liked about Roland Joffé and his approach to the civil war.

And now the anecdote. The protagonist, Manolo Torres, appears reading a newspaper at a certain moment. It is El discussion. My specialization program is the History of Communication. To get to El discussion is a very fine line in the research about the historical context of a film. It makes all the difference. The producers could have been satisfied by having Manolo reading the ABC. And that wouldn't have been bad. But the ABC was tremendously slanted to the monarchist right wing. Manolo Torres has no ideology, he is on the national side out of pure hatred for the workers' forces that have put an end to his business and the life of his father. The discussion, in spite of the almost total anarchy of those moments, always tried to "temper the bagpipes". It is credible that Torres read that diary, since he was not in the war for the love of any cause. It is also a way of reflecting the inner complexity of the character.

It seems to me that the whole film sample that: the complexity of human decisions in a very adverse context.

About Josemaría Escrivá I can only say that Charlie Cox is not Josemaría Escrivá... but he could be. To my way of thinking that was the biggest challenge of the film and it is more than surpassed.