\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t A heated online debate between Argentine filmmakers and critics sparked through the local film community last week, triggered by Juan Villegas\u2019 dictatorship documentary Not to Kill.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The 4-hour film, which premiered in the Argentine Competition of the 27th Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival (BAFICI), features testimonies of former left-wing militants reflecting negatively on the violence of their past actions. The director also interviews living relatives of civilian victims who died in guerrilla attacks, either as targeted victims or accidental casualties.<\/p>\n
The film sparked heated reactions on social media after its premiere, followed by a series of articles in favor of and against the film\u2019s perspective.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Among them were texts written by filmmakers like Mariano Llin\u00e1s (a co-writer of Oscar-nominated Argentina, 1985), critic and director Nicol\u00e1s Prividera (M, Fatherland), and filmmaker Albertina Carri (The Blondes, The Daughters of Fire).<\/p>\n
Critics call it a \u2018boring\u2019 and \u2018naive\u2019 film Prividera, whose 2007 first film M dealt with the disappearance of her mother and her link with guerrilla organization Montoneros, accused the film of timely echoing the Milei administration\u2019s denialist stand on dictatorship crimes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The film, he wrote, \u201cdidn\u2019t really differ\u201d from the latest video released by the Office of the Presidency on the 50th anniversary of the coup, which promoted the perspective of a so-called \u201ccomplete memory\u201d that aims to place guerrilla crimes on the same legal level as state terrorism.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ever since his first presidential debate in 2024, President Javier Milei challenged the military dictatorship\u2019s court-documented existence of a systematic plan of disappearance and extermination between 1976 and 1983.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Milei has promoted the notion of a \u201cdirty war\u201d in which the military only committed excesses in fighting subversive armed groups.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
In his article on the Ojos bien abiertos website led by C\u00f3rdoba-based critic Roger Koza, Prividera blamed the film for lacking a historic perspective on the origins of armed revolutionary organizations.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He also challenged the director\u2019s outspoken objective that the film would shed light on allegedly silenced voices. \u201cThe truth is that these stories have been made public since the very moment the events took place [while disappearances were simultaneously denied],\u201d Prividera wrote.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Villegas, a former film critic who directed half a dozen films, responded with an article on the same website. \u201cNo one can deny that there is a public discomfort \u2014 especially within the progressive consensus surrounding the 1970s \u2014 when it comes to the testimonies of relatives of victims of guerrilla actions,\u201d he wrote.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fact that these stories have appeared in national newspapers or books does not contradict the fact that they remain taboo, particularly in Argentine cinema,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Albertina Carri, former director of the Asterisco LGBTIQ film festival whose parents were disappeared by the military dictatorship, went all out against the film, citing both political and aesthetic reasons.\u00a0<\/p>\n
These included both its lack of reflection on issues like corporate complicity and the film\u2019s extended duration, which she described as purely \u201cboring,\u201d as well as \u201celementary and naive.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cKilling is wrong,\u201d wrote Carri. \u201cWhat\u2019s curious is that they only seem to be discovering it now. Or rather, it\u2019s as if these filmmakers, only now realizing that killing is wrong, want to drag the rest of us into that belated awakening,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
Defenders deny the denialism charge Mariano Llin\u00e1s, spearhead of the independent production collective Pampero Cine, who also co-wrote Santiago Mitre\u2019s upcoming Netflix film about the first Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, praised Villegas\u2019 film for challenging the topics denialists usually use \u201cwithout being denialist itself.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
In his own article, Llin\u00e1s described the very existence of the film as an audacious stand within the difficulty of narrating the 1970s without either romanticizing revolutionary organizations or positions that could fuel denialist stances.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That tension, in his view, has turned characters and experiences like the ones depicted in Villegas\u2019 film into a sort of forbidden zone for contemporary Argentine cinema, \u201cas if they feared that the policies of Memory Truth and Justice weren\u2019t able to deal with its gray or conflictive areas.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
That boundary, wrote Llin\u00e1s, was \u201cprecisely what Villegas\u2019 film managed to cross\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt barely \u2014 maybe \u2014 aims to prove that such a film is possible,\u201d Llin\u00e1s stated, and said that since the premiere of the film, Argentine cinema is \u201cfreer, braver, and better\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Hern\u00e1n Iglesias Illia, a former communications official in President Mauricio Macri\u2019s administration, also defended the film in online magazine Se\u00fal, where Villegas regularly writes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe film tells us that we can listen to the pain of these people \u2014 sons, daughters, or siblings of those killed by violent organizations \u2014 without putting at risk the consensus surrounding state terrorism or the principles of memory, truth, and justice,\u201d he wrote.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He also dismissed the idea that the timing of the film\u2019s premiere boosts a wave of denialism by the government. \u201cThe conversations that truly matter almost always arrive at moments that seem terrible,\u201d he wrote.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s also why they matter.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A heated online debate between Argentine filmmakers and critics sparked through the local film community last week, triggered by Juan Villegas\u2019 dictatorship documentary Not to Kill.\u00a0 The 4-hour film, which premiered in the Argentine Competition of the 27th Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival (BAFICI), features testimonies of former left-wing militants reflecting negatively on the violence […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":61018,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15859,12827,149,2245,316,1366,1442,15860,15861,15862],"tags":[15855,12823,133,2243,4897,1364,2188,15856,15857,15858],"class_list":["post-61017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-albertina-carri","category-bafici","category-culture-ideas","category-dictatorship","category-film","category-film-series","category-human-rights","category-juan-villegas","category-mariano-llinas","category-nicolas-prividera","tag-albertina-carri","tag-bafici","tag-culture-ideas","tag-dictatorship","tag-film","tag-film-series","tag-human-rights","tag-juan-villegas","tag-mariano-llinas","tag-nicolas-prividera"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61017\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}