The Official Story: When Oppression Hits Home

  This last month, Wim Wenders, the director behind movies such as Wings of Desire (1987) and Perfect Days (2023), made a statement at the 76th Berlin Film Festival that’s been scratching at me. In his words, “Yes, movies can change the world. Not in a political way. No movie has really changed any politician’s idea, but … we can change the idea that people have of how they should live.”

Wenders was speaking specifically on the subject of film festivals taking active stances on things such as the Israel-Palestine conflict, further describing, “Cinema has an incredible power of being compassionate and empathetic. The news is not empathetic. Politics is not empathetic, but movies are. And that’s our duty.” 

I think the dressing of this verdict was supposed to be optimistic, but the sentiment reminded me of something that actress Jennifer Lawrence said also very recently on why she’s pulled back from using her official platforms to speak out against the Trump Administration, something that sounded much more resigned. In her words, “But as we’ve learned election after election, celebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for. So then what am I doing? I’m just sharing my opinion on something that’s going to add fuel to a fire that’s ripping the country apart. We are so divided … If I can’t say something that’s going to speak to some kind of peace or lowering the temperature or some sort of solution, I just don’t want to be a part of the problem. I don’t want to make the problem worse.” 

Bicycle Thieves (1948)

          I’m not really in position to say whether or not they are correct in their assessment. But I also want to say upfront that I am actually very sympathetic to the positions of both Lawrence and Wenders. The current landscape is such that civil dialogue over important issues just gets washed out in volumes and volumes of rage, and it honestly does feel at times like there’s just nothing you can do to fix the problems that are embedded in the system.

But despite all this, I have always treated film like it was a thing that mattered. Not just a pleasant distraction, but a vehicle for making the world better. But I guess the question remains … how? And, in what way? And I’m going to explore this question today through the lens of one movie that deals with politics perhaps more directly than any other film I can think of: Luis Puenzo’s 1985 Argentinian film and winner at the 1986 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, The Official Story.

The movie is set in 1983, the final year of Argentina’s last military dictatorship. The story sees the wife of a wealthy government official having her eyes opened to the way she benefits from her government's systemic execution of undesirables. Margery Resnick, Professor of Literature, said that the film, “… examines the human aspects of political unrest” and also, “… asks how much of the political reality that surrounds us are we willing to ignore in order to live comfortably.”

         Now, a couple of things make this film stand out against other movies examining the effects of living through a dictatorship. To start, the film doesn’t really focus at all on the political kingpins orchestrating all this, nor on the people who were being directly targeted. Its attention is in this odd middle ground, spotlighting the people who were benefiting from the regime. This film examines the echoes of social turmoil as felt by those who are completely insulated from any pushback. This in contrast to something like I'm Still Here which looks at the issue from the perspective of the victims of the persecution.

The movie shares some broad similarities to probably the central touchstone for movies about good guys stepping in during legalized persecution–Schindler’s List. Both see a person of privilege awakening to the injustices being committed against their neighbors and their responsibility to take concrete action. But The Official Story has a few key differences. 

    Schindler’s List was noteworthy for the way it unflinchingly depicted the humiliation and violence afflicted against the Jewish people during the Holocaust. The Official Story, on the other hand, is entirely bereft of any actual depictions of government-sanctioned violence. We only see its aftereffects. Schindler’s List also emerged as a Hollywood production fifty years after the events being depicted. Meanwhile, The Official Story is documenting the crimes that took place in its own country only a few short years after the fact. (This is just me tallying differences in approach, incidentally. No part of me is trying to put these films in competition with one another.) 

This film uses one woman’s journey to explore a country reckoning with the crimes hiding just in its shadow. And for how boldly it confronts a very dark reality, it actually paints a rather optimistic portrait of humans in the face of injustice. As Alicia dares to open Pandora’s Box, she reckons with both the sins of her government as well as her own participation, and in the end, she chooses to sever herself from her connections to these corrupt systems.

And this is where the film starts to test me. This is where I start to ask whether the film, in its quest to find answers or provide comfort, winds up inventing solutions to problems that are just immutable. This is where I start to ask those questions about film as a potential agent for change in a system, even when that system actively repels change or correction. And that’s truer nowhere else than the very system that The Official Story is trying to examine. Which brings the question of whether the film’s promise of change is just too good to be true.

 

Argentina and the Junta Militar

         Let’s go back in history to the events that The Official Story is depicting. 

As is often the case, the grounds for the dictatorship in Argentina had root in the economic crises besetting the country—and the tyrants who rose to power under the promise of being strong enough to do what needs to be done in order to reset the board, no matter what it took. This was certainly the state of the country when then President, Isabel Perón, promoted Jorge Rafael Videla, Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to the General Commander of the Army. The next year, he would lead the military coup to depose her and pronounce himself as President of Argentina. 

    On March 24, 1976, the military made this pronouncement over the radio, “The population is informed that as of this date, the country is under the operational control of the military junta. All inhabitants are advised to strictly comply with the provisions and directives issued by the military, security, or police authorities, and to exercise extreme caution in avoiding individual or group actions and attitudes that could require drastic interventions by personnel in operations. Signed, Jorge Rafael Videla.”

Jorge Rafael Videla

The stated goal of the dictatorship was to restore order and economic stability. But almost immediately, this regime flexed an iron hand over the people, seeking out and exterminating dissenters. Among the crimes was La Noche de Los Lápices, “The Night of the Pencils,” which transpired September 16, 1976, in which the dictatorship carried out the kidnapping of ten high school students with suspected ties to subversives. These kids were taken from their homes to a sequestered detention center where they were tortured, questioned, and raped for days on end. Four of these students survived. The remains of the other six were never found.

         As this was all going on, the Argentinian people were protesting and speaking out against the brutality of the dictatorship—and many of them would pay a heavy price for it. For many, this would result in exile. Thousands of other dissenters, however, would be disappeared. Killed. Erased.

         Some of these dissenters were pregnant young women, and these victims of the regime would give birth while they were held captive before they were killed in the usual fashion. The children they left behind were then given to wealthy families with ties to the regime. It is estimated that over 500 babies were stolen across this regime–this is the situation that the film most closely examines.

         One of the most noteworthy developments related to the junta military takeover was the formation of The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, the grandmothers of these stolen children, who marched in front of the main city square in Buenos Aires every Thursday afternoon in protest of the government that shattered their families. One of the most prominent members, Lydia Taty Almeida, recalled in 2009,

“Even if you are not an activist, no woman is ever prepared to lose the most precious thing to her, her children. Most of us were schoolteachers, housewives, and some were professionals, but none had experience in activism. We asked questions to the government. Everything was learned by doing …

“When we started, no one took us seriously. People called us crazy. In a way, perhaps we were crazy because of our grief and pain. If we went to the police to report the disappearances, the police would say, ‘Oh yes, don’t worry, your son has probably gone away with his girlfriend.’ Many people were also scared and ignored us. It was important for us to form the group, to have other mothers uplifting each other’s spirit …”

         Most of these grandmothers never found out what happened to their children, though it is now widely known that many of these were drugged and then thrown into the ocean from an airplane. In 1995, one of the officers in charge of these flights, Adolfo Francisco Scilingo, shared his account of what actually went down during these missions. "There were men and women, and I had no idea who they were or what they had done. I was following orders. I did not get too close to the prisoners, and they had no idea what was going to happen to them."

But he said he had a slight change of heart during one flight, after a noncommissioned officer, who had not been informed of what the mission entailed, panicked when he realized what he was being asked to do. Scilingo recalled, "I reached over to try to comfort him, and I slipped and nearly fell through the door. That's when it first hit me exactly what we were doing. We were killing human beings. But still we continued …

"I have spent many nights sleeping in the plazas of Buenos Aires with a bottle of wine, trying to forget. I have ruined my life. I have to have the radio or television on at all times or something to distract me. Sometimes I am afraid to be alone with my thoughts."

Raúl Alfonsín

        As the dictatorship failed to live up to its promises, its hold over the people began to waver. After holding command for 5 years, Videla would be replaced three times during the last year of the junta government. All the while, the world grew more aware of the dictatorship’s mounting atrocities. Reynaldo Benito Bignone, sworn in July 1, 1982, would be the first to restore democratic election to try placating a restless country, but one of his first orders of business was to try granting amnesty to the leaders who had enabled genocide.

A year later, though, the people voted in Raúl Alfonsín, and his central engine was putting the dictators on trial. Five of the leaders of the Junta Militar were sentenced to life in prison, including Videla and Viola. These trials put a true end to the military dictatorship in Argentina. In 2012, Videla would be sentenced to fifty years in prison for the systematic stealing of children. He would die in prison a year after his sentencing. The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo continue marching through today as of this publishing. 

This all actually happened, and this is the scenario that the film examines.

        The basic template for this film has been the basis for a lot of what we’d call popular film. Something like The Prince of Egypt or The Ten Commandments sees Moses, a man raised in privilege, reckoning with his responsibility to a systemically oppressed people. In the end, Moses chooses to reject the comfort his station affords him and become a champion and leader of the oppressed group.

In a similar vein, this movie sees Alicia, a wealthy schoolteacher and wife of a government official, questioning the origins of their adopted daughter. Following the rabbit trail has her confront the frightening reality of the violence her government has done to her neighbors. She learns of the systemic execution of civilians and that her daughter is indeed one of these stolen babies. Learning this causes Alicia to make contact with her daughter's biological grandmother while also turning her back on her husband for his willful complicity in these atrocities. Alicia is awakened to a dark reality and chooses to extricate herself from it.

But without getting into the historicity of Biblical stories today, let’s decide that as works of art, those films have more in common with epic fantasy than what we’d typically consider “historical film” in the way of something like The Official Story. And this is where things get interesting.

Tyranny Onscreen

War of the Worlds (2005)

Film has always tried to capture the spirit of current events, including the anxieties and indignation of a people who are subject to the whims of people who are much more powerful than them. But as we discussed with Raya and the Last Dragon, as a capitalistic product, a film wants to eat up as many dollars as possible, which is hard to do when you take definitive stances against certain practices or policies. This is darn near impossible when the point of contention is something like taxing the wealthy. Standing up to an ongoing dictatorship, that’s a whole different beast.

The film we now call The Official Story was written during the height of the dictatorship when there was no sense for how much longer this regime would be in power, and it’s hard for me to articulate just how bizarre it is that this film even exists, much less that it premiered when it did. These descriptions of our protagonist’s friend being hurried off in a car only to be taken somewhere dark where strange men prodded at her for weeks … these were being written as this sort of treatment was still happening. Even having seen like a bajillion movies across the hundred years of movies, I’m struggling to draw approximates to American film and culture. 

The Bravados (1958)

         There were, for example, critiques of America’s involvement in the Vietnam conflict very shortly after the fact, but that was more filmmakers pushing back on the government being reckless, not … murdery. Systemic racism had been integrated into society long before Hollywood started actively addressing it, let’s say during Sidney Poitier’s run in the 1960s. War movies, noir films, and even westerns of the 1940s and 50s very closely tracked the stains on the American psyche after their participation in all the bloodshed, but warfare still requires a much different framework than the government literally disappearing undesirables.

            The closest equivalent I can come up with is probably my go-to for these things, Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. That movie turned the camera directly onto Hitler’s atrocities and his targeting of the Jewish people. This kind of thing called on America to take an active opposition to the rise of Naziism. But even here, we have an artist making a comment on the atrocities being committed by some other nation.

         Even looking outside Hollywood, there isn’t a lot of precedent for film being used in this way. What you tend to see is a delayed response where a country sort of digs its heels in for a generation only to revisit its dark past some twenty years down the road. Something like The Shop on Main Street tracked Slovakia’s complicity in Nazism; but again, this was some 20 years after the events of World War II.

         Again, there aren’t a lot of parallels across history, so I’ll just say … consider that today in America we have the heads of Paramount and Disney who will bend over backwards to appease the whims of a dictator—pulling actors and comedians who speak out against an authoritarian status quo, or demanding that certain interviews not be aired. 

And in case you’re wondering, yes, artists were among the exiled by the junta government. The lead actress for The Official Story, Norma Aleandro was among the exiled. After publicly commenting on the actions of the government, she was on the receiving end of two attempts on her life, one at the theater she worked at and another at her house before she hid away in Uruguay and Spain for the greater part of the dictatorship.

Avengers: Endgame (2019)

Looking back to broader cinema, movies about rebellion often spill into fantasticality. It makes sense that popular entertainment would continually try to incorporate war or dictatorship into its cache. There are often casualties in these scenarios, yes, but this all tends to be washed out in some heightened adventureism that both romanticizes and obscures the real human cost of totalitarian regimes.

Star Wars sees Darth Vader exterminating an entire planet right before our eyes—literally billions of lives lost. But we emerge from this scene without processing anywhere near the psychological toll of billions of deaths or what it means for a power structure to subjugate or tyrannize its subjects like this. If anything, we think it’s kinda cool. It’s lights out for Alderaan, and then we move on to the next roller coaster. (And this is also without speculating on how exploitative it is or isn’t to depict the literal violence of the loss of human life onscreen.

I’m naturally not ganging up on Star Wars for doing what basically all of popular entertainment does. But it does beg the question of how to reckon with the gravity of political abuse in a way that doesn’t just treat the situation like a video game. Which is a major part of why The Official Story’s portrayal of these things is so noteworthy, even against representations of real-life, non-fantastical oppressions.

    Unlike something like Schindler's List or Hotel Rwanda, the actual violence being committed is never shown onscreen. We never visit the detention centers where the political prisoners are being tortured or prepped for execution. That all exists in this film as a distant hypothetical, which is a large part of what grants Alicia that off ramp to just never reckon with the reality of what is happening to her neighbors.

This film explores the crimes of governmental tyranny through a very specific kind of violence: the mutilation of a family unit. Alicia is not reckoning with stolen wealth or territories. Her plunderings are a little more complicated than that. She has effectively built her own family on the bones of a target of government violence. Another woman would have mothered her little girl if the powerholders in her system had not thrown her off a plane because she dared to speak out against their corruption, and the family members of these disappeared individuals are left behind marching in the street. Walking through that equation in her mind forces Alicia to trace out the whole system that subjugates its people in this way and how she has benefited from the subjugation of people who are smaller than her. 

Alicia gets to reckon with exactly what she stole from this girl and her family because she feels it herself: Alicia gets to love this little girl because she was stolen from another mother, and she can’t bury her head knowing that. In the film’s final scene, where Alicia is confronting her husband with their complicity in the crimes of the regime, Roberto demands to know where she has hidden their daughter. Alicia just replies, “Horrible, isn’t it? Not knowing where your child is?” Walter Goodman wrote of the film in his review for The New York Times,

“The most memorable scene brings Alicia together with an elderly woman (Chela Ruiz) who believes that Alicia's child, Gaby, may be her grandchild. Miss Ruiz's portrait of the humble, determined grandmother is a wonder. In minutes, with the help of a few much-handled snapshots, she evokes an entire family history and a nation's loss. Pride, joy and despair mingle in the telling. Although in a way competing for Gaby, the two women are united by a profound sympathy that cuts through all distinctions of age and class. In this encounter, the film achieves nobility.”

Alicia’s Story

         At the start of this film, Alicia and Roberto appear to have a happy relationship in which they gladly dote on their daughter, buying her dolls and taking her to birthday parties. About half of the story unfolds in a house or other such domestic settings. If you’re watching this without a lot of historical context, which I definitely was my first viewing, you have no sense that they are living in a dictatorship.

         An early scene sees Alicia at a fancy dinner with some of her husband’s business friends, and she displays some irritation at the slanted social dynamics within the group, which segues into our first indication that their child is adopted. Our first mention of the political situation sees Alicia and her husband’s friends making table talk about the government not knowing who to blame, but still no mention of government disappearances or anything shady. By the time we do mention “subversives,” these socialites are all musing about how of course the people who were banished had to be guilty. The government obviously wouldn’t be doing this if the people being punished didn’t deserve it.

         Alicia’s first step toward awareness is in her interactions with Anna, her friend who has been out of the country for seven years. Where Alicia is kind of white-knuckling it through dinner with her husband’s friends, she and Anna appear to have a very comfortable friendship. They have a history and inside jokes about what happens when they drink too much egg nogg. (Re: they are very close.) And this is where the cards start to turn over.

         Anna says she “left,” but with a little prodding, she tearfully recounts to Alicia how she was abducted from her own apartment and tortured for days before being deported. Anna was taken in because her old boyfriend, whom she had not seen in 2 years, was a suspected dissenter. This is also where Alicia is introduced to the idea of women’s babies being abducted.

Alicia connects some dots and realizes that she doesn’t know much about Gaby’s birth family, and when she’s visiting Roberto at work, she sees one of his coworkers have a meltdown when he realizes he’s being subpoenaed. By the time Alicia sees protesters marching in the street demanding the government release their stolen family members, she is visibly spooked. Around here, a colleague tells Alicia, “It’s always easier to believe it’s impossible. Because if it were possible, it would require complicity of people who refuse to believe, even as it stares them in the face.” (This same person later teases her that “there’s nothing more touching than a guilty bourgeoise lady.”) In the words of Aleandro, 

'''[Alicia] is one of those who couldn't believe and didn't want to believe what they were told, what they suspected was true. It's interesting because it describes a situation common in the history of man and dictatorships. People who are not directly affected try to live on the margin. A near reference is Germany during World War II where perhaps so many Jews didn't have to die if more people had believed the horrors they were told were going on.” 

         As Roberto is out on business, Alicia starts probing trying to find her daughter’s birth mother. All the while, her inquiries are stonewalled by her support network. It’s during this chapter that Alicia meets Sara, the woman who might be Gabby’s grandmother, as she marches with the other protesters.

         This is also where we get a bit of insight into the perspective of the complicit when Roberto gets into an argument with his dad at a family picnic. Roberto asserts that his father is old-fashioned, that the military coup was just a natural step in the world’s progression. To oppose it is to cling to arbitrary ways or to expose one’s weakness. Roberto sees his station in life as something he has earned and his right to enjoy as he sees fit. (There is subtext suggesting that Roberto may have been the one to sell Anna out to the authorities.)

Alicia makes a few bids for Roberto to follow her down the rabbit hole. Toward the end of the film, she invites Sara over to the house to discuss their situation, but Roberto furiously demands that Sara leave the house. Thus, Alicia is forced to admit that her husband feels absolutely no qualms over his part in their government’s corruption. In fact, he actively resists introspection and is content to benefit from the oppression of others. Accepting this, Alicia takes her purse and walks out of the house. She leaves behind her keys, signaling that she does not intend to return.

         Part of what makes this representation so savory is the way that it teases the idea that a society built on corruption could ever be repaired at the dinner table with nothing but open conversation and a tabletop of old family photos. This transformation is also very self-initiated. Alicia notices something wrong in her system, and she takes it on herself to follow that to its natural conclusion, and in the end, she winds up transformed. Alicia acts out an elaborate and cathartic psychological process in slowly reckoning with the realities of the system she occupies and her own participation in it. As she recounts her situation to her priest, Alicia insists, “I don’t need absolution, I need the truth!” 

And this is where, for all its basis in documented reality and history, the film starts to feel more like wish-fulfillment.

 

Does the Upper Class Even Feel Guilt?     

This premise behind something like The Official Story imagines that if you just appeal to a person’s sense of decency, then their defenses will fall. And this is true even for those buried under layers of privilege and corruption. But when you look at documented behavior of people of privilege in times of subjugation, you can maybe start to see why stories about benevolent rich people can start to feel like a Hollywood fiction.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)

    In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Claude Rains is so moved by James Stewart’s vigilance in standing up for the little people and the way he earnestly opposes corruption that he confesses his complicity in front of the entire house of representatives and even attempts suicide out of contrition. But one thing we’ve gotten to know regretfully well here in America of the 2020s is that the comfortable majority of powerholders secure their position atop the pyramid by putting themselves beyond the reach of remorse or even reflection. 

Part of their transformation in the public perception has come from the ability to film modern royalty and document the realities of their behavior. Seeing their blunders roll out in real time has robbed the elite of their mystique, and also their claim to plausible deniability. Kristy Noem trying to justify on live television her choice to shoot her 14-month old puppy just has no backpedaling. And there are certain sociological observations that corroborate this image as well. Michael Mechanic wrote for The Atlantic,

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)

“… people of higher socioeconomic status, compared with those lower down the ladder, are more prone to entitlement and narcissistic behavior. Wealthier subjects also tend to be more self-oriented and more willing to behave unethically in their own self-interest (to lie during negotiations, say, or to steal from an employer). In one study, [Paul Piff, Associate Professor of Psychology Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley] and his colleagues stationed a pedestrian at the edge of a busy crosswalk and watched to see which cars would let the person cross. Suffice it to say that Fords and Subarus were far more likely to stop than Mercedeses and BMWs.”       

The Official Story emerged from the country it is examining, yes, and from the nation that was being oppressed, but not necessarily from the voice of that country’s ruling class–the people who were enabling this oppression. (We could argue, I suppose, about whether artists really count as part of a country’s ruling class akin to like a government official.) And so this film is kind of exploring the grief and horror of “how could this happen to my country” through the eyes of someone who may not even be experiencing these feelings in the first place. And this makes Alicia’s whole dance routine seem a bit disconnected from reality.

    The Zone of Interest, 2024’s Best International Film winner, kinda put a fine point on this. That film saw a wealthy family literally making their home next to a concentration camp, displaying just how unperturbed the elite class can be by atrocity. Modern media has generally caught onto the idea that the wealthy and elite are more than complicit in the world being the way it is. 

We can choose to not paint with one brush here and imagine no rich person can overcome their base programming, but we can perhaps decide that this is not an ecosystem in which those necessary altruistic impulses are nurtured. And so, it’s also perhaps no surprise that these people end up where they are on the pyramid because they had to claw their way to the top. They actively design the world to fit their interests at the expense of the underclass, and they can be willing to ignore or justify worlds of injustice if it suits them. People who break this trajectory tend to be exceptions, even aberrations.

         The “Wicked” story probably gives the most optimistic representation of this process we could ask for. That situation sees Glinda, who represents the height of her society, gradually acknowledging how she benefits from the stratification embedded into Oz. The vehicle for this transformation is the unlikely friendship she strikes with Elphaba, an outcast in this system who is eventually vilified by the powers in place in order to silence her dissenting voice. Glinda’s connection to Elphaba becomes the channel for her feeling emotional investment in the plight of groups that she is not a part of, and after a few laps around the track, Glinda is finally able to follow the footsteps of her friend and use her influence to correct the injustices of her world.

         Wicked checks off all the boxes, but its ultimate thesis falls closely aligned with what we know about social dynamics, including the indifference of those not affected by oppression and their deference to pleasant falsehoods. The story itself kind of admits that the masses are set in their ways, and the only chance Oz ever has for purging itself of its sins is to unload all its prejudice onto a shared target. Elphaba allows herself to be the scapegoat so that Glinda can emerge as the leader who will cleanse Oz of the evil that The Wizard has afflicted upon it. “They need someone to be Wicked so that you can be Good.” Any gains they make only come after conceding to a certain impermeability in the attitudes of the wider population. 

         So let’s decide for a moment that this Oscar-winning movie made under dire conditions is wish-fulfillment. Does that render this entire text useless? Dare we dream? Can "art" such as this be used to create empathy or curiosity where none exists? Might there be something to be gained by modeling accountability and restructure onscreen and hoping that someone with access to power might actually do something about it? Could they see Alicia do the daring thing and imagine they too could reclaim their dignity as they started to live a life of principle?

Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)

    I guess the question that this film really poses is … do we really think that film can truly change the tides? Can it make change where it counts? And if not, then perhaps film’s true purpose was never to stay the destroyer’s hand, but to serve as the final testament of the lighthouse keepers, that whether or not mankind could thwart the designs of wicked men, then whatever else we say after the fact, we can at least say that there was resistance.

         Parts of this conundrum are beyond me to answer. There are parts I can’t personally speak to, like whether the powerholders in our system are beyond remorse or reason. There are parts I can speculate on. There are connections I can imagine—such as the way that the megalomaniacs aren’t particularly well-versed, culturally, and would probably find a movie like The Official Story really confusing, or else deeply boring. 

Tender Mercies (1983)

    But what I have discovered time and time again is that film can have tremendous effects on the individual. This is maybe where Wim Wenders and I might find ourselves in agreement. Trying to use film to be actively political comes with some very specific challenges. But art can fundamentally change a person’s heart. And it is one heart at a time that a nation changes. And there may be spaces where a film can use that energy to help a nation find itself again.

         Because, again, The Official Story also isn’t really about overcoming corruption on a systemic or national level—perhaps in part because these issues were not resolved in the real world at the time that this film was being written. Alicia’s story reaches its culmination not when she takes down The Fire Lord, but when she is ready to accept the truth of her reality, and when she is ready to cut ties to her security net and move forward on her own. It is a close, intimate look at one person choosing to no longer participate in the systems that are poisoning her country.

    And so a work like The Official Story, which translates the fears and urgencies of its time into a language that can be universally understood, perhaps offers more to the conversation than just wish-fulfillment. It's the same kind of thing we talked about with From Here to Eternity, except this model suggests that good-faith actors won't always have to sacrifice their actual lives in order to enact change in their systems. But you do have to sacrifice something.

    I don’t presently have a lot of knowledge concerning how the film was received in Argentina at the time of its release when the country was still reckoning with its participation in the regime. Though, I’m told it performed well at the domestic box office, indicating that a sizable portion of the country was ready to, even eager to, reckon with this dark reality, and that art can be used as a method of delivering vital information to the masses.

Sara and Alicia’s last scene together winds up being a pivotal one because this is where you see how their shared motherhood unites them rather than divides them. Sara has every opportunity to loathe Alicia for her connection to her daughter’s disappearance, but her final embrace of Alicia shows the gratitude she feels to her for choosing to reconnect her to her lost granddaughter. And this is where Alicia reclaims what was really lost to her. 

        

"It Couldn't Happen Here"

         There have been essays in recent years where I’ve gotten to say that “Golly, gee, I didn’t realize that my piece would end up being so timely." That wasn’t the case this time through. Part of the reason why I held off from writing this piece was that I could see just how relevant the material was, and I just didn’t want to have to wade through all that. At some point, I felt like it became too costly not to afford the situation some examination in this space.

    I’m obviously writing this in the context of the political misgivings of my time and my country–America has perhaps never looked more like the landscape of The Official Story than it does here in 2026. And so what films like The Official Story pose to me is this idea that change is possible, even for those who insulate themselves in privilege and comfort. When you hold a banner long enough, it will eventually be found by those precious few who are willing to take the necessary steps to cleanse a system of its impurities. The choice always remains in the individual–Alicia chooses to try making amends, and Roberto does not. But that change is possible.

    In the process of writing this essay, I attended a civic demonstration protesting the violence done by ICE. Some of the people I saw there were probably career protestors, but I feel like it bears some mentioning that this was very much me going out of my comfort zone, and I can't begin to estimate how many of these people were in this camp with me. But even though I live in one of the most conservative parts of the country, this event saw people of different generations, ethnic backgrounds, and personal histories united. Maybe none of us were experienced in these things, and we all probably had different specific ideas of what we want for America, but our love for our country and our desire to see it restored was enough to coax out of our shells and into the sun together, and I took some comfort in that.

    Norma Aleandro said of the movie at the time of this movie's release,

    "There are always different reasons not to be involved or have solidarity with others -- especially in a place like Argentina where your life could be in danger. In that way, Alicia represents the common people. Alicia's personal search is also my nation's search for the truth about our history. The film is positive in the way it demonstrates that she can change her life despite all she is losing."

    Puenzo put in a final word: "These things that happen cannot be seen from the States as if Latin America is another planet. It can't be seen as if the U.S. had nothing to do with it. The fact that a military government appeared in not only Argentina, but in Uruguay and Chile is not a coincidence …

    "The U.S. should be conscious of what is happening to us. I think we make politics in our own personal lives. It's common to all of us. The people in our movie wonder, 'What do I have to do with this reality?' That is a question North Americans also have to ask themselves.” 

                --The Professor