Nuestros Desaparecidos (Our Disappeared)

Juan Mandelbaum

United States

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Synopsis

The director embarks on a journey to find out what happened to his long-lost girlfriend who was kidnapped and never seen again during Argentina's brutual dictatorship.

REVIEW

Like many other university students in Argentina in the 1970s, Juan Mandelbaum had leftist sympathies and participated in protests aimed at precipitating social and political change. When the right-wing government's efforts at repressing dissent increased in severity and scope, Mandelbaum left for the United States.

Some thirty years later, he thought he might track down some of his former friends and acquaintances in Argentina and typed into Google the name of an old girlfriend, Patricia Dixon. Expecting to find that she had become "a teacher or maybe a psychologist," Mandelbaum instead discovered that his old girlfriend was listed among Argentina's disappeared-one of the roughly 30,000 people murdered by Argentina's military government between 1976 and 1983.

This discovery prompted Mandelbaum to return to Argentina. "Our Disappeared" documents that journey. Weaving together archival footage, images of old photographs, and interviews with family members and friends of those killed, "Our Disappeared" constitutes an act of remembering on at least two different levels.

First it is an effort at historical narration-aimed at insisting on the need to keep recalling this troubled and troubling period in Argentina's past. Second, in presenting a series of intimate portraits of individual lives lost, the film functions as a memorial-most directly to the handful of people who are the subject of the film, but more generally to all those who were killed by the Junta.

"Our Disappeared" works, in short, to make Argentina's national tragedy a personal affair-to make it possible for the viewer to register emotionally the ongoing costs of these horrible crimes committed under the guise of providing security. The film functions at once as a historical document, as a searing indictment of state-sponsored terrorism (and thus a warning for our times), and as a profoundly moving work of public mourning.

-Beverly Allen