Argentina revisits politics of mass amnesia

Juan Jose Campanella (right) reminds us that paramilitary corruption started with the Peron government. Photo / Supplied by Rialto

When it comes to winning Academy Awards for best foreign-language film, it's hard to beat France and Italy: the two countries have taken 10 and nine respectively of the 55 Oscars given out since the award was formally established in 1956.

But this year's winning film was from Argentina, not a country that is front-of-mind for filmgoers on this side of the Pacific. The Secret in their Eyes, written and directed by Juan Jose Campanella, is an elegant, gripping and multilayered thriller, which unfolds in two eras: 1999 and, in flashback, the mid-1970s.

The story revolves around a state criminal investigator, Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin). In 1974, he investigated - and failed to solve - a brutal rape and murder; in 1999, he is trying to write a novel about it - and the past comes back with a vengeance.

Deftly interweaving a love story and a crime thriller, the film is not overtly political but it is inseparable from its political context. Those with long memories will recall that the mid-1970s was a time of savage repression in Argentina: as many as 30,000 people - 9000 of them have been verified and named - disappeared, many dropped alive from helicopters far out into the Atlantic Ocean.

Much of this took place under a military dictatorship (which chillingly described itself as engaged in a "process of national reorganisation") but Campanella, 51, wanted to remind his compatriots that the process began under the democratically elected Peronist government that was in power until 1976.

It was in that era that the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance (known as the Triple A), a shadowy paramilitary group dedicated to suppressing all (not just communist) political dissent, was formed. The Triple A was later a major tool of the military junta and the so-called "Dirty War".

In a director's note, Campanella remarks that "the past always comes back" but, like many Argentine artists, he has had to deal with a national amnesia.

"After the democracy came back in 1983, there were trials and many of the men from the junta were jailed for life [though they were pardoned and released in 1990]. There was a lot of interest in learning what happened in those years. People were tuning into the trials on televison and the radio and talking about it," says Campanella, speaking by phone from Buenos Aires.

"But then I think they reached a point where, as a society, they needed to stop talking about it because it was the therapeutic thing to do. So for many years movies that were set in the time of dictatorship were a complete flop and people didn't want to see them. They had gone through the trials and needed to put it behind them."

Among the movies that suffered from the calculated indifference was 1985's The Official Story, Argentina's only other Oscar winner, in which a middle-class woman is confronted with her lawyer husband's dirty past. But Campanella says other films and many works of theatre right through the 1990s suffered the same fate.

"History was rewritten," he says. "In the public consciousness everything happened during the military dictatorship. The fact that the Triple A and the state terrorism began during the democratic government of [Isabel] Peron was completely forgotten and ignored. So it was a piece of forgotten history that we wanted to rescue."

Plainly it struck a chord. The Secret in their Eyes is the second-most successful local release in Argentine history, after an obscure werewolf picture scarcely seen elsewhere. Campanella suspects that is simply a matter of a changing national mood.

"Now we have a Peronist government again," he says. "And anyway, the film is not about the dictatorship. That is its context. I think people maybe went through a lot of years of ignoring it and now they want to revisit it.

"Also, it is the first time during the democratic era that there has been a film set in the years prior to the dictatorship and I think they responded a lot to the fact that it was showing the serpent's egg [the genesis of the evil that was the military government], that it was happening in the government before then."

Campanella, who wrote the script, made substantial changes from the source novel. Notably he foregrounded a woman character and made her part of the murder mystery. "In the novel she is a very minor character and has nothing to do with the crime case but what interested me was the passion that tied all the characters together.

"I was always intrigued by the idea of making a movie in which none of the characters are saying what they mean, but with their eyes they are telling the truth. It's what separates the movies from any other narrative art - the possibility of getting really close to somebody's eye - that was the intriguing part of the story."

Campanella is well-regarded in the US, where he has directed television drama. But he enjoys working at home where he has made several films since 2000 including a comedy and an epic 13-part historical miniseries.

"I like it here," he says of Buenos Aires. "My wife, my son, my life is here."

LOWDOWN

Who: Juan Jose Campanella, Oscar-winning director
What: The Secret in their Eyes
When and where: At cinemas from Thursday