The little pawn

A production by Minimal Films and La Perifèrica produccions, with the participation of RTVE, in coproduction with XARXA, 3cat, with the participation of IB3, ICEC and ICIB and with the support of ICO

Synopsi

Arturito Pomar, at the age of twelve, appeared on the covers of magazines in the forties as a child chess prodigy. He became a popular figure in Spain at a time of misery, and thanks to him, the game of sixty-four squares became so fashionable that thousands of Spaniards began to practice it. The Franco regime, interested in showing the friendly side of the dictatorship, did not hesitate to take advantage of the cultural and intellectual prestige that Pomar’s international fame would bring him. They exploited him by making him play simultaneous games and competitions, abusing his childish figure for their own interests. In the collective memory there is the idea that, when he stopped being a child, he stopped playing and fell into oblivion, but the reality is that Pomar continued progressing in chess long after he was considered a child prodigy.

As a young man, without the help of the government, he traveled for three years all over America, winning tournaments and money as fast as he spent it. Money meant nothing to him; he had become an eccentric man who only understood chess. When he returned to Spain, he married and had seven children. To support his family, he became a civil servant in the Post Office, but he did not abandon his great and only passion: chess.

Despite his large family and work, he continued to play all over the world, reaching his key moment in the 1962 Stockholm Interzonal, the tournament prior to the world championship. There he played all alone against the best in the world: the Russian players and Bobby Fischer from the USA. He had reached the peak of his career, but the superhuman effort of preparing the games with hardly any sleep broke him and triggered schizophrenia.