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Dominican Rep. La dama del ajedrez (The Chess Queen)
- Original title
- La dama del ajedrez
- Year
- 2013
- Country
Spain- Director
- Screenwriter
- Cast
-
Documentary
- Music
- Cinematography
- Producer
- Genre
- Drama. Documentary | Chess
- Synopsis
- The rules of modern-day chess as we know it may have been invented in Valencia in the 15th century, according to this documentary. It was based on the game Chaturanga, from India, before being adopted by the Persians and then brought to Europe by the Arabs, the programme reveals. The end of the 1400s was a time of great economic and cultural splendour in the city of Valencia and its intellectual élite, who were mostly Jewish, adapted the existing rules of the game to make it more agile and speed it up. Until then, it was a very slow and sedentary process, but the Jewish upper classes altered it, basing it upon their perception of the courting ritual among the aristocracy and introduced the figure of the queen.
She had hitherto been known by the Arabs as the visir and was of a much more lowly status than the current chess queen.
The allegorical poem Scachs d'Amor, written jointly by three authors in 1475 in an early form of catalán, the language spoken on the east coast of Spain and which evolves into valenciano between the provinces of Castellón and Alicante, mentions the queen for the first time, proving that she was not, as originally believed, based upon Isabel of Castilla.
Scriptwriter and director Agustí Mezquida believes it is more likely the chess queen was based upon María of Castilla, consort of King Alfonso the Magnanimous, although chess expert Marilyn Yalom of Stanford University in the USA believes the chess queen does not come from one specific figure, but from several, since centuries ago queens began to play a much greater role in governing.
Some 20 years after the poem was written, the erudite Valencian Jew Francesch Vicent compiled and published the modern-day rules of chess under the title Llibre dels jochs partitis dels scachs en nombre de 100 ('book of chess games in numbers of 100'), written in valenciano, and which was considered to be the 'holy grail' of books on the subject.
The documentary La Dama de Ajedrez ('The Chess Queen') involved 20 or so international chess experts and historians and was filmed in various parts of the Comunidad Valenciana, Catalunya, the Basque Country, the USA, France and Italy, and was supported by the Valencia regional government and the Spanish central government's ministry of culture.
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