El Juicio (The Trial) [2023]

 1985 was a momentous year for Argentina – and a beacon of hope for her Latin American comrades – since just 2 years out of an exceptionally repressive right-wing military dictatorship, its judiciary put the junta’s top brass, including Jorge Rafael Videla, on trial for their ghastly crimes – one that’s drawn comparisons with the Nuremberg Trials for its significance and breadth – and that too in civil court. Though televised for posterity, the recordings unfortunately remained largely unseen. Ulises de la Orden took help of the human rights group Memória Abierta and the Norwegian Parliament to access the magnetic tapes, and then spent a decade sifting through 530 hours of footage and rendering them into 3 hours of immensely powerful and profoundly sobering memorialization that attests to collective resistance through remembrance. Structured into 18 chapters – each touching upon specific aspects of the state-sponsored violations that occurred during the “Dirty War”, from the grotesque to the baroque, including such events as “Night of the Pencils” and “Night of the Ties” – this collage of analogue videos, its historical vitality and political immediacy aside, made for a surprisingly engrossing work purely through an archival assemblage. While maximum screen-time is accorded to victims, survivors and relatives recounting their horrific sufferings and loss, it also regularly peeked into all the present stakeholders, viz. the heroic prosecuting duo of Strassera and Ocampo; the obnoxious and indifferent defendants; the morally bankrupt defence attorneys; the weary judges; and the emotionally invested attendees. The eruption that breaks upon Strassera’s stirring closing argument, where he turned “¡Nunca Más!” (“Never Again”) into a rallying cry of protest and defiance, leaves a lasting impression. Mitre’s engaging film Argentina, 1985, incidentally, chronicled the same subject.

Director: Ulises de la Orden

Genre: Documentary/Political History

Language: Spanish

Country: Argentina