Tiempos Circulares is the cryptic title of the film and “Nuestra venganza es ser felices” (“Our revenge is to be happy”) the accompanying message but the latter is also slightly meretricious – unlike most films, there is no happy ending (or end) because there is no happy beginning.
Andrés Dunayevich’s film tells through the prism of two pairs of brothers the story of H.I.J.O.S (Hijos e Hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio), a grouping with the common denominator of being left orphans at an early age when their parents joined the thousands disappeared by the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, as opposed to the victims of concentration camp baby-snatching adopted elsewhere.
A pain which runs too deep and underlies the film for all the gallant attempts to claim the “revenge” of happinesss although it is to the credit of all dictatorship victims that they never sought to take the law into their hands to avenge their blighted lives, as this film correctly states, trusting in the justice giving H.I.J.O.S their middle letter.
Shown at the MALBA museum on December 12 in the week of Human Rights Day with the sponsorship of the Buenos Aires Herald (only its third screening after Córdoba and Montevideo), this recently made film is a more coherently crafted narrative of H.I.J.O.S than many people might expect from the grouping’s often negative image in mainstream media playing up their abrasive escrache exposures of people they call “genocides” (in local terminology, if perhaps not quite meeting Raphael Lemkin’s original definition).
The film revolves around two sets of brothers, Ramiro and Martín Fresneda and Pablo and Carlos ‘Carli’ de la Fuente – apparently chosen at random to represent the entire grouping but it might be suspected that Martín Fresneda having been Human Rights secretary between 2012 and 2015 gave them a head start. It is perhaps unfortunate that there are four brothers with no sister because a female perspective on this uniquely traumatic experience might have been invaluable – nor do female voices abound in the rest of the film.
Not that this film is just four talking heads telling their tales of woe – Dunayevich shows cinematic skills in juxtaposing their personal testimonies with a variety of images including news footage, domestic life and the Catamarca mountains where H.I.J.O.S was born at a 1995 campsite. Political milestones and military dragnets apart, it is such home movie images as the Córdoba house of the Fresnedas’ grandmother or childhood recreations from the past century which really drive home that the past is another country – far more than the mise-en-scènes of period films.
The film starts with the detention and subsequent disappearance of labour lawyer Tomás Fresneda and his wife in Mar del Plata in mid-1977, uprooting their little sons to relatives in distant Córdoba and Catamarca. The long nightmare of the dictatorship is chronicled, followed by the return of democracy with Raúl Alfonsín in 1983 while the triumph of justice with the 1985 Trial of the Juntas (not surfacing in the film despite being screened in the week of its 40th anniversary) is slowly unpicked in the following years with Alfonsín’s due obedience laws and Carlos Menem’s 1990 pardons. H.I.J.O.S was born in 1995 when the orphans had mostly left school while their escraches began in 1998 – the film shows their continuing comradeship since then.
Throughout Dunayevich is eminently fair to all not guilty of crimes against humanity and even to them – thus the late Third Army Corps commander Luciano Benjamín Menéndez is given a couple of minutes to state his case via footage of his 2008 trial, basically arguing an extension of the Cold War to these shores.
So far with what this film says but perhaps its most striking feature is what it does not say – not once is the name of Kirchner mentioned despite the enormous political and financial muscle Kirchnerism gave to the human rights movement and the proliferation of trials during their 12 years of hegemony. Hard not to suspect that Dunayevich has astutely perceived that society has moved on since the Kirchners and aspires to keep the human rights movement moving too – if H.I.J.O.S began without the Kirchners in 1995, they can continue without them.
If that is the logic, it is as bold as it is shrewd, a complex question indeed. It must be immensely difficult for the beneficiaries of Kirchnerite largesse not to feel a huge debt of gratitude even if also hard not to see the ulterior motives. In this reviewer’s opinion, Estela Barnes de Carlotto (of almost purely English blood, unlike the author of these lines) is a paradigmatic case – this journalist followed her work with the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo in the past century when she represented the purest of human rights in contrast to Hebe de Bonafini, but the enormous government backing in this century sadly seems to make her feel some kind of ethical imperative to toe every Kirchnerite line.
Not a word on the Kirchners in the film and nor from either of the De la Fuente brothers speaking afterwards but former Human Rights secretary Martín Fresneda evidently weighed by that debt of gratitude felt obliged to request applause for Néstor Carlos Kirchner and then “an unjustly imprisoned” Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The question here would be: If H.I.J.O.S have such a total trust in the judicial system that they have never sought to take the law into their own hands, much to their credit, why cannot they believe that Fernández de Kirchner was fairly convicted by that same system for corruption on the basis of overwhelming evidence?
If correctly understood, Dunayevich’s film is an imaginative move towards breaking this umbilical chord and taking the human rights cause back to its basics by purifying its essence. But by any standards, it is a worthy film which should even be seen by the advocates of “complete memory” to complete their memories.
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