Dictatorship

CAMPO, JAVIER

Directory of World Cinema: Argentina

Intellect Books

Lugar: Bristol - Chicago; Año: 2014; p. 118 - 121

"We Argentines are right and human", said de facto president Jorge Rafael Videla in 1979, in response to the frequent challenges to his policies of repression. At that same moment, filmmakers were initiating the prolific task of creating a cinema of denunciation or testimony in favour of respect for Human Rights in Argentina. The dictator´s funny phrase (which under the circumstances was horrific) would echo in the brains of many Argentine filmmakers still in exile. Such was the case of Humberto Ríos, who filmed This Voice Among Many (Esta voz entre muchas, 1979) in Mexico. This documentary includes testimonies by prisoners, torture victims and relatives of the disappeared, and was made at a time when there was still hope that they might be rescued alive. Human rights cinema in Argentina can be divided into three broad categories. The first comprises testimonial documentaries that function as if they were courts investigating the atrocities committed in clandestine detention centres. To Ríos's documentary one may add Only Emptiness Remains (Todo es ausencia, Rodolfo Kuhn,1984), Juan, as if Nothing Had Ever Happened (Juan, como si nada hubiera sucedido, Carlos Echeverría, 1987), Hunters of Utopia (Cazadores de utopías, David Blaustein, 1995) and M (Nicolás Prividera, 2007), among others.