This was one of the first films my class looked at this
semester, and it still strikes me as one of the most plain and entertaining
dramas that we watched, compared to all of the experimental Latin American
cinema we've studied.
Directed by Luis Puenzo, father of Luisa Puenzo who
I've written about previously, La Historia Oficial is set in
1980s Argentina, at the tail end of the horrific military dictatorship racking
the nation. Made in the middle of the fallout of that same dictatorship,
Puenzo’s film directly deals with the pain the Argentinian people were going
through.
La Historia Oficial follows
Alicia and Roberto, two upper/middle class Argentinians who have made it
through the time of terror by toeing the party line—and their adopted daughter,
Gaby. During the dictatorship, tens thousands of people were “disappeared”,
including young, pregnant women. It’s been seen in the following years that many
of those babies were given to high ranking members of Argentinian society.
It becomes more and more apparent to Alicia that this might
be the source of her hurried and off the books adoption of Gaby, and the guilt
begins to wreak havoc on her life.
I like viewing this movie not only as an expression of pain,
specifically women’s pain, following national terror—but also as a more
individual transformation of a woman like Alicia, who must finally confront the
lies she has accepted and lived under for nearly her whole life.
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