The Official Story Movie Download

10 / 10

a search for the truth
In 1976, a group of generals overthrew Argentina’s government and began a campaign of terror against the population. Thousands of people got kidnapped by the government, never to be seen again. These people are known as the Disappeared. Luis Puenzo’s Academy Award-winning movie “La historia oficial” (“The Official Story” in English) focuses on this. The protagonist, Alicia, is an affluent teacher who has never taken much interest in politics. But the discovery that her adopted daughter might be the daughter of a disappeared woman forces Alicia to rethink her previously neutral view of the government.

The movie reminded me of John Sayles’s “Men with Guns”, which also focuses on a middle-class person in Latin America who starts to reconsider his views. Indeed, Puenzo noted that the plot reflects Argentina’s efforts to find out the full truth of its history (one of the protagonist’s students even proclaims that “history is written by assassins”).

Everyone should see it. I suspect that this sort of thing happened in every country that saw a military junta seize power. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo continue to congregate in the plaza to demand the truth about what happened to their children, while junta leader Jorge Videla got sentenced to jail in 2012 (he died the following year).Read More