Starring Ricardo Darin, Peter Lanzani and others, it dramatises the gargantuan task of a battery of lawyers to prosecute those responsible for the most violent dictatorship in the country’s history.
The film, by virtue of re-enacting the ‘Trial of the Junta’, also opens up Argentina’s painful memories (and remembrances) of ‘The Disappeared’ – where about 30,000 people were kidnapped/killed by the military that dubbed them ‘left-wing activists’ and ‘terrorists’, many of them never to ‘return’.
Evidence is sought against nine army commanders; witnesses are questioned; threats are made against the prosecutors for ‘insulting the institution of the army’ by digging up an episode that many want to be ‘forgotten’.
Mitre stays clear of overt melodrama, opting for a more straightforward – yet dramatic – telling of how the trial unfurled and the country reacted to its every twist and turn.
It is a film about a country coming to terms with its own shameful past. It has no dance sequences, songs or eye-watering special effects. Felicidades.
