Argentina's Dirty War rears its head in Venice film
Bechis says the film draws on survivor testimony and research, with rights groups estimating about 30,000 people were killed under Argentina’s dictatorship.
- Director Marco Bechis's 'Return to Buenos Aires' competes for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, following Italian doctor Mariano Guerra as he returns to Argentina to testify against military officers who held him captive.
- This film arrives 27 years after Bechis's 'Olympic Garage' depicted Argentina's 1976-1983 Dirty War, drawing on the director's own experience as a survivor of a clandestine torture camp.
- Actor Adriano Giannini portrays Guerra as a 'tragic figure' forced to betray fellow prisoners to survive, embodying Bechis's exploration of survivors some do not regard as genuine victims.
- Although set in Buenos Aires, production was filmed in Porto Alegre and Turin because Bechis felt unable to make films in Argentina under its current 'authoritarian technocrat' leadership.
- The drama is one of several Latin American films at Venice revisiting 20th-century dictatorships, including Martin McDonagh's 'Wild Horse Nine,' with the festival's top prize awarded Saturday.
13 Articles
13 Articles
‘Back to Buenos Aires’ Review: Marco Bechis’ Return to the Screen Covers Similar Ground to Earlier Works but is Only Fitfully Effective
The return of Marco Bechis to filmmaking after 10 years is a welcome surprise, and the terrain he covers in “Back to Buenos Aires” is a familiar one for the veteran Chilean-Italian director who himself was caught up in the nightmare of Argentina’s military dictatorship. Set in the present, with frequent flashbacks, the film tells […]
It takes pity and forgiveness also for the collaborators. Marco Bechis returns to the Venice Festival eighteen years after Birdwatchers. Drawing, with Return to Buenos Aires, a final parable compared to that Olimpo Garage that in 1999 after the first at the Certain Regard in Cannes created a stir and indignation on the Italian screens. There the exhibition "normal" [...] The article Pietà and forgiveness for those who collaborated with the tortu…
The film tells the story of Mariano Guerra, an Italian doctor who decides to return to Buenos Aires to testify in a trial against the military who had kidnapped and enslaved him, after more than three decades without returning to the country. Bechis, italochileno who lived in his youth in Argentina, part of his own experience, when in 2020 he traveled there to testify about the time he spent in an underground concentration camp in 1977. "That wa…
Il Tempo
Venice, 11 Sep. (askanews) - 27 years have passed since the release of "Garage Olimpo," the film with which Marco Bechis showed the crimes committed by the Argentine military dictatorship, and at the 83rd Venice Film Festival the director brought "Back to Buenos Aires." Set in 2008, the film shows what it means for a survivor of seizures and torture to return to that country to testify to the trial against the former military. The protagonist is…
Bechis returns to dictatorship trauma with Venice contender
More than 25 years after ‘Garage Olimpo’, filmmaker Marco Bechis returns to the trauma of Argentina’s dictatorship with ‘Ritorno a Buenos Aires’, a drama about survival, guilt and the scars left by state terror.
Venice, Italy, Sep 11 (EFE).- Almost 30 years after turning his memories of the hostage of the Argentine dictatorship into ‘Garage Olympus’ (1999), filmmaker Marco Bechis has again evoked those dark times of repression since the Venice Festival with his film ‘Ritorno a Buenos Aires’ because, he claims, the cinema “must bear witness”. [...] The Marco Bechis entry evokes in Venice his Argentine captivity: “I had the privilege of surviving” was fir…
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