Documentary brings Argentina’s 'death flights' trauma to big screen

With tears in their eyes, a packed cinema of Argentines were confronted this week, some not for the first time, with the horrors of the so-called "death flights" carried out by the country's brutal 1976-1983 military dictatorship.

They had gathered in Buenos Aires for one of the first domestic screenings of Traslados ("Transferred") – an investigative documentary on a very dark chapter of the nation’s not-too-distant history.

The title of the film refers to prisoners – activists and others viewed as enemies of the military junta – who were rounded up on the pretext of being "transferred," drugged, then loaded into planes and thrown out over the Río de la Plata, some already dead but many still alive.

Many were tortured before being exterminated. There are still large gaps in what is known about the flights, including the identities of many of the victims. 

The new film "puts evidence on the table, brings together all the pieces and gathers everything found out from 1976 to present day about the 'death flights,'" director Nicolás Gil Lavedra said ahead of the screening before a full house in Buenos Aires.

The documentary – with historical rigour and the pace of a detective story – includes dramatised reenactments based on testimonies from dictatorship survivors, the work of researchers and archival material.

The movie reconstructs the puzzle piece by piece, from the first signs to the court rulings which proved the events took place.

"Being an investigative documentary, there are no partisan or subjective opinions, there are facts and there is evidence," insisted Gil Lavedra. 

He said the 90-minute feature was mainly aimed at people born after the dictatorship under which about 30,000 people were killed or disappeared, according to human rights groups.

"I think it's essential for young people today to know what happened, what students who studied in the same classrooms we did went through," Octavia Ortuno, a 24-year-old Bolivian psychology student at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), said after the screening. 

Memory, truth and justice

Traslados will be shown for a few weeks in Argentina before a European tour, which will take it, among other destinations, to the San Sebastián festival in Spain.

It will be aired on a special day in support of Argentine cinema, scheduled for Tuesday, September 24. The domestic scene is under pressure, subject to deep budget cuts inflicted by self-declared "anarcho capitalist" President Javier Milei.

A central theme of Traslados is the fate of Esther Ballestrino, Azucena Villaflor and María Ponce – the founders of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo human rights group that fought and still fights for answers about the fate of the disappeared.

They were kidnapped along with French nuns Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet and seven other activists, and thrown from a plane on the night of December 14, 1977, according to a reconstruction of events.

The group of 12 who were abducted were identified by a former marine, Alfredo Astiz, who had infiltrated the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. He is now serving life imprisonment for his role in the deaths.

In July this year, a group of lawmakers from Milei's La Libertad Avanza party visited Astiz and others convicted of crimes against humanity in prison, an event that created an uproar in the country. 

"This documentary shows that they are criminals serving a sentence for crimes against humanity," said Gil Lavedra, who decried the way lawmakers referred to the prisoners as “old men doing time … who didn’t deserve it.”

The filmmaker, who had previously made Verdades Verdaderas (“True Truths”), a film about human rights activist Estela de Carlotto – the president of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo – is the son of Ricardo Gil Lavedra, a judge who had presided over post-dictatorship trials, including the iconic Trial of the Juntas in 1985, after the return of democracy.

For him, the after-effects of Argentina's dark past can only be overcome "by having a collective memory. The whole society has to understand that the dictatorship was state terrorism and we all have to condemn it.”

He concluded: "The only way we have to heal that wound is with justice, truth and memory."

Argentina's dictatorship was one of the most brutal of the slew of military regimes that sowed terror in Latin America from the 1960s through the 1980s.

Milei, however, has questioned the number of disappeared, raising the ire of many Argentines.

Leaving the screening of Traslados last week, 74-year-old Víctor Fuks, said the film had touched him "in a very special way."

He had fled to Spain in 1977 to escape the dictatorship, remaining there for 34 years.

“There was a number of friends, comrades, people who were disappearing,” he recalled.