Four-star movie: The Official Story

[carbonel]

The Official Story
Director: Luis Puenzo
1985

An Argentinean mother is forced to question her government's official story of the "Dirty War" of the 1970s when she comes to suspects that her dearly loved adopted daughter may be the child of a murdered political prisoner. Her husband, who works in the government, tries to stop her quest -- he may not know the answers, but he doesn't want to, either.

This is an independent film that was apparently made just as things were changing in Argentina. It's an uncomfortable movie, because it doesn't give any answers, but asks many questions, while showing both the people who don't want questions asked and the people demanding answers.

Comments

[naomikritzer]

I saw this in Spanish class when I was in high school back in the 1980s. Quite a bit more recently, on a discussion board for parents, there was a mom from Argentina and the movie came up in conversation (probably we were discussing some more contemporary adoption/kidnapping case). She got really excited when I mentioned seeing the movie; the movie was a really, REALLY big deal in Argentina in part because it won a U.S. Academy Award. So obviously Americans had seen it. The fact that I was an American who had (a) seen it and (b) remembered it well enough to bring it up decades later: that was really cool, apparently.

[naomikritzer]

I'll add that this movie probably made an additional impression on me because my mother was strongly concerned about Las Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo, and with the issue of the decaparecidos and what happened to their children. This wasn't an issue that touched on us personally: we were not Argentinian, we didn't have any close friends from Argentina, none of us had ever been to Argentina. My mother identified with them because they were mothers, I think.