Educational Media Reviews Online

The film aims to present an hour-long introduction to the horrors of Argentina’s “Dirty War” and the Abuelas organization’s attempts to recover their grandchildren who were born in captivity. According to the film’s website, it also asks “is the right to identity a basic human right?” In trying to condense so much information into an hour, the film makes sloppy mistakes that undermine the overall human rights orientation of the movie.

Early on, the film allows screen time to apologists for the military regime. While it is important for students to understand the ideological cover used to justify human rights abuses, the film does not counter these arguments until much later, a move that seemingly gives credence to the government’s war against godless communists. Another interviewee, who later becomes more sympathetic, describes the problem with the killings as the governments’ tendency to progress on to the pursuit of ever softer targets. This quote unintentionally suggests that the killing of some citizens, without a fair trial, is acceptable.

At one point in the movie, the narrator indicates that “according to human rights organizations,” children were stolen, implying that this indisputable fact is up for debate. Another segment of the film shows clips from Argentine propaganda made to whitewash the military’s image during the country’s hosting of the World Cup, but—rather than identifying the clip’s provenance—simply uses the voiceover “some say” to qualify its claim that the police are upright and just. As far as voiceovers go, the use of spoken translations of Spanish passages in the film’s English version robs many of the interviewees of affect, a problem that would not have occurred with subtitled translations.

I would recommend that professors continue to use two commonly taught 1985 films to inform students about the “Dirty War”: Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (1985) by Susan Blaustein Muñoz and Lourdes Portillo or Luis Puenzo’s Oscar winning feature La Historia Oficial (1985). The interviews with children of the disappeared who have learned their true identity—this film’s main improvement upon these earlier films—do not have sufficient impact, given the formal device of the voiceover translations, to replace these two classics.