Begoña Echeverria, Writer & Co-Executive Producer Women’s Empowerment Fund Recipient
Annika Speer, Director & Co-Executive Producer Creator’s Fund Recipient
ABOUT THIS SHORT FILM
Written by Basque scholar and artist Begoña Echeverria and directed by Annika Speer, Children of Guernica is a short film that follows Andrea, a child refugee from Gernika who was evacuated to England on the S.S. Habana in 1937. Having grown up to become a child psychologist specializing in art therapy for refugees, Andrea carries her own unresolved grief until an investigative journalist helps her uncover long-buried truths about her family — and ultimately find peace.
The film grows out of their five-year collaboration on the acclaimed stage work Picasso Presents Gernika, which has been performed at the Chino Community Theatre, the Santa Monica Playhouse, the United Nations Headquarters, and internationally at the Sabino Arana Foundation in Bilbao and the Cervantes Institute in Manchester, UK. Children of Guernica is co-produced with Beginning Middle End Films (BME) and writer/director Jacqueline Postajian, and is believed to be the first narrative film originating from the Basque-American diaspora to tell this story on screen. Together, Echeverria and Speer have co-authored peer-reviewed scholarship on the project published in Performance Research, The STEAM Journal, and the anthology Theatres of War: Contemporary Perspectives.
The BEO was one of the earliest and most generous donors to this project. Grant support from both the Women’s Empowerment Fund and the Creator’s Fund is helping the team hire production and post-production personnel, secure venues and permits, and cover festival submission fees as they prepare to enter the film festival circuit. A rough director’s cut has been screened, and festival submissions are anticipated to begin in 2026.
WHY IT MATTERS
The bombing of Gernika was one of the most brutal attacks on a civilian population in modern history — and its story has long been told through politics and paintings, not people. Children of Guernica changes that by centering a child’s experience and carrying it forward into adulthood, asking something harder than “what happened?” It asks: what does it cost to carry that, and what does it take to heal? That question belongs to all of us. The BEO is proud to have been there from the beginning.