«Argentina 1985» and the civil task of cinema to ensure that horrors do not repeat themselves – Corriere.it

This film by Santiago Mitre, applauded at the Venice Film Festival from where it was released without any Lion, is the dramatic story of the end of a nightmare, that is, of the dictatorship of the military junta of which imposed a cruel regime of torture and disappeared from 1976 to 1983, to the command of General Jorge Rafael Videla (1925 – 2013) and his entire horror company. As was Kramer’s Winners and Losers in 1960, with that impressive cast, which was the long Nuremberg trials of Nazi crimes, Argentina 1985 is tasked with removing a nightmare through legal channels.

And also, as well as a public story, the story of a suffering, of a crisis, of the private doubts of the lawyer Julio Strassera (as always irreplaceable Ricardo Darn) who governs the fate of the hearing and on which the fate of the trial and the opinion of the popular jury will depend. And there is also a partner in court who has his own record of anxieties, the younger Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the equally good Peter Lanzani. But, as can be easily understood, the film that you must and can see on Prime Video has above all a civil and educational task, it must explain what happened to those who were not present, to prevent the horror from repeating itself according to historical cycles and recycling .

Four months of preparation pass on the screen and then of debate to organize the proceedings of a trial that involves an entire country, with 833 witnesses who can’t wait to tell the moral and material ugliness of which they have been victims and witnesses in torture centers and clandestine prisons, with a tribute to the cruel history of humanity of as many as 30,000 people who disappeared into thin air and that mothers still cry today. Nothing easy, the dictatorship still has secret and hidden weapons and men to threaten reprisals, bombs and deadly attacks, but this time the cinema knows what it has to say and how, it knows the meticulousness of a hearing that must keep us glued to the court bench.

We know that there has been a crime against an entire nation, everyone has been hit in his or her heart, so the director puts the human factor in the foreground even of those who have to judge an opprobrium like this, but without ever asking rhetoric for help, it all stems from the desire to explain and remember, not to forgive, because danger is never around the corner. Then we have the drama of the preface when the lawyers prepared the preliminary investigation, then the parade of witnesses at the trial (with a frightening testimony) and finally the sentence arrives which, at least at this moment, puts men at peace, as they say, of good will