A brutal military dictatorship goes on trial in Oscar contender ‘Argentina, 1985’
Raul Baduel, the director of Argentina’s bloody 1985 military junta that ruled the country for a decade before a successful popular uprising brought down the government, is back after a 20-year prison stretch for crimes including torture and human rights violations. He has made an Oscar-nominated documentary about the junta’s fall.
The film, Argentina, 1985 — the real story of a military coup in South America — is about a military junta that ruled Argentina for a decade before a successful popular uprising brought down the government, it is being screened at a film festival in Buenos Aires on Wednesday.
The movie, which opens in New York on Friday, tells the story of how the junta, led by Major General Jorge Rafael Videla, a former police officer, was overthrown by Argentine citizens who demanded a government of the people, for the people, and by the people.
To the surprise of many who were expecting an apolitical documentary, Baduel’s film includes interviews with many of the country’s leading intellectuals and political activists, including Marxist intellectual Ernesto Laclau, former feminist lawyer Mirtha Macias, and human rights activist Marcela Valdes.
The movie also shows the extent to which Argentine society had grown tired of military rule in the 1960s and ’70s.
“When all the people who knew it the best got together to say, ‘We want our country back,’ people were able to do something they hadn’t been able to do before during this period, which was to fight for their civil rights,” Baduel told the Hollywood Reporter in an exclusive interview in Buenos Aires.
“In the first phase of the junta, there was a military victory. The people weren’t involved, as they were when they had a dictatorship.”
The rise and fall of the military dictatorship of Argentina, 1985 is one of the most famous films ever made about Latin America.
‘Argentina, 1985’ is one of the films to make an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.
The film tells the story of Jorge Rafael Videla’s military junta, which ruled Argentina from March 1976 to 1983. It is the only Argentine film which has been
