The documentary El petit peó, an 81-minute production produced by MINIMAL FILMS I LA PERIFÈRICA, under the direction of Joan Gamero, based on a script by Carmen Rodríguez and Joan Gamero, will be screened next Thursday, June 19 at 7 p.m. at the Can Castellet Cinemas in Sant Boi de Llobregat.
Tickets are priced at 6 € and can be purchased both at the cinema box office and through its website: https://www.cinemescancastellet.com.
Juan Gamero, visited us in several editions of EL LLOBREGAT OPEN CHESS: held in Castelldefels and Sant Boi; with the intention of interviewing masters and documenting his work on Arturo Pomar. Today it is already a reality and we will be able to see its realization.
The life of Arturo Pomar has been the subject of study in recent years. It is a sad story. One of many in this ungrateful country.
This is explained by Paco Cerdà, in his novel “El peón”, published in 2023. Although it is not strictly a biography of Arturo Pomar, it rescues the story of this child chess prodigy, used and abandoned by the Franco regime. The novel uses the chess match between Pomar and Bobby Fischer in Stockholm 1962 as a thread to explore themes of personal commitment, power and history. The work also explores the lives of other “pawns” in history, both in Franco’s Spain and Kennedy’s United States.
As Paco Cerdà explains, “in the figure of Arturito Pomar there is the epic of the Mallorcan child prodigy who, at only twelve years old, made a draw with the world chess champion and became a pop icon of a hungry, backward and gray country. There is also the poetry of a game that is art, that is science, that is sport, that is as brutal as boxing in a black and white ring, with invisible blows in the minds. But there is, above all, the drama of the anti-hero: the child prodigy exploited to exhaustion by the Franco regime and then abandoned by the regime when he needed it most, before that mythical and forgotten game played in Stockholm, in the winter of 1962, against another pawn of the Cold War, Bobby Fischer”.
The logic of power always follows paths different from those used by citizens. Dictatorships are even coarser and do not need to disguise their indifference towards the pawns: they are used as long as it is convenient and cornered when they are uncomfortable.
Arturo Pomar, the first grandmaster of Spanish chess, the child prodigy who at the age of twelve made a draw with the then world champion, Alexander Alekhine: it was on July 16, 1944, in the first International Chess Tournament of Gijón.
GM Aleksandr Kotov (1913/1981), distinguished chess trainer in the extinct Soviet Union, great theoretician of this game, even said that if he had been born in his country, Pomar would have aspired to the world title.
Pomar won the title of Spanish champion for several years. He had no support, the regime forgot about his exploits and a chess genius who was born on September 1, 1931 in Palma de Mallorca and died in Barcelona on May 26, 2016, was lost to posterity.
