Between Comunicado de Argentina (1977) and Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo (1985) there lies a time of darkness. A black screen separates the two films. Minutes become years — the seven years of the most brutal and ferocious military dictatorship in Argentina’s history. The before and after give new meaning to that suspended interval: an open wound, the pain of not knowing, a society that remains silent. In his theory of experimental music, John Cage rejects the idea of silence as a moment in which nothing happens; he imagines it instead as a space containing the sounds of the world. What are the rumours held inside that black frame? In the projected darkness, silence becomes complicity — an empty space haunted by the absent, by ghosts.
Lili Massaferro tells her story in Comunicado de Argentina. After her son Manolo was murdered by the police, she joined the Montoneros movement and founded its women’s branch, the Agrupación Evita. The film, made by the collective Lucha Film, is a fragmentary composition built from documents recovered, reconstructing the life of a militant to reflect on the pain of the blows and the vision of a possible future.
Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo stands as a paradigm of collective resistance. United by a shared grief, they found each another, gathered together, and embraced. Using the white headscarf as a flag, they occupied the square. They faced silence with their cries, taking to the streets because they could no longer mourn alone. Lourdes Portillo and Susana Blaustein Muñoz shaped this pioneering film which bears witness to their struggle and captures the pulse of Argentina’s democratic transition.
Since 2022, the research project Depósito ZINEBI, promoted by the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola Film School, has sought to recover the films which make up the festival’s historical archive. This screening celebrates the value of that ongoing process — from the discovery of the prints, through their inspection, cataloguing and digitisation, to their return to the cinema screen, once again projected at this festival.
Paola Buontempo y Matías Fajn
Based on a letter from activist Lili Massaferro to an American friend, narrated in voice-over, and using archival material from various Argentine media outlets, the film recounts Lili’s personal story and her political commitment, intertwined with Argentina’s own history: Peronism and the figure of Evita, the death of her son Manolo, and the Peronist feminist movement of the 1970s.
Documentary that captures the testimony of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, whose children were detained and disappeared during Argentina’s last military dictatorship (1976–1983).
