In 1986, the Argentinian film The Official Story won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 2023, another Argentinian film has been nominated in the same category. Its title: “Argentina, 1985.”
Both films focus on the same period of history, a sad one for much of South America but particularly for Argentina. It was in 1976 that a military junta overthrew the country’s civilian government and began something called Operation Condor, which involved hunting down and arresting those deemed to have leftist sympathies.
And to call what happened to those people over the next several years being “arrested” is to make light of what actually occurred. The professed aim of the operation, which came to be known as the “Dirty War,” was to target what the junta termed as communists and terrorists. Yet people from many sectors of life—whether they were political opponents or students, trade unionists or journalists—ended up in the junta’s net.
An arrest typically meant a kidnapping, often at night by men in plain clothes driving unmarked cars, followed by interrogation, torture and in many cases death. Or, in the word that became associated with the time, a disappearance.
Official records documented some 8,961 disappearances and other violations. But some estimates claim that up to 30,000 Argentinians ended up either murdered or disappeared—which likely amounted to the same thing.
It was only after Argentina lost the Falklands War with Great Britain in 1982 that the junta fell out of favor, and by 1983 civilians had again taken control of the government with the election of President Raúl Fonsin.
The film Argentina, 1985, which was directed and co-written by Santiago Mitre, takes up a year later. The prosecutor Julio César Strassera (played by Ricardo Darín) is tasked with taking the top military leaders and three former presidents to trial. His co-counsel, Luis Moreno Ocampo (played by Peter Lanzani), is far younger and less experienced. But it is he who convinces Strassera to form a team of 20-somethings willing to make up in enthusiasm what they lack in legal expertise.
And so we watch as the investigators track down as many witnesses as they can find (in real life some 833 of them), including a number who survived the brutal conditions. We watch as they testify in open court, their stories painfully revealed. And we watch as the verdicts are handed down.
Anyone with access to the Internet can discover what happened in the actual case. And that includes the controversial aspects of the real Strassera’s own inaction as a prosecutor during the “Dirty War.” For the purposes of Mitre’s movie, though, only Strassera’s initial reluctance to try the case is dramatized. We so love our heroes to be without flaws.
And in any event, there’s no question that what Strassera and his team did accomplish took courage. As the movie shows, death threats and bomb threats were common. Even so, the prosecution forged on.
Darín, one of Argentina’s leading actors, isn’t new to this theme. In the 2002 film Kamchatka, he was cast as a human-rights attorney on the run in 1976 from security forces. And he manages to portray Strassera as a man caught in a system that holds no promise that justice will prevail, and as a man whose concerns are as much about the safety of his family as they are for his career.
Speaking of Strassera’s family, each of them plays a part in helping the prosecutor proceed with the case: his wife (played by Alejandra Fletchner), his young son (played by Santiago Armas Estrevarena) and his teenage daughter (played by Gina Mastronicola).
Their presence, plus the occasional moments of humor that Mitre provides, makes Argentina, 1985 less of a slog through tragedy than it might have been. That it doesn’t reach the heights of art that The Official Story does is debatable. However, it can’t be denied that Mitre’s message is one that needs to be repeated over and over.
No one, not even former presidents, are above the rule of law.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
Movies 101 host Dan Webster writes about
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