Benjamín Ávila
Infancia clandestina

After Perón's death, General Videla becomes dictator. It is 1979, and a couple of revolutionaries in exile return to Argentina with their two children and their uncle. Infancia Clandestina boils down to this, a plot that seems only sketched for a film split in two, on one side the struggle for freedom and on the other the clandestine childhood of the two little ones, perhaps even more painful than the political activism of the parents, a film about the revolution where the revolution is only at the margins, it is the backdrop of a missed youth, of a Bildungsroman that suddenly unfolds, of a boy, Juan/Ernesto, who sees his love for an Argentine girl fade away because of the clandestinity in which he is forced to live. A protagonist of nothingness, his life acquires a new awareness when his uncle is killed, the same uncle who once said that «happiness is not smiling but believing, having faith, believing a lot in something so as to be able to obtain it. And living that way».

Ávila, like Larrain in No (a film about the Chilean referendum pro/against Pinochet’s dictatorship) or Guédiguian in Les Neiges du Kilimandjaro (that is, as someone said, the working class in Marseille doesn’t go to paradise), brings out the people that books hide behind those impersonal acts that time has reduced to sand, a brave, revolutionary choice that hides a fundamental historical motivation, because Infancia Clandestina is not a film about revolution, it is a film about intimacy; it would indeed be anachronistic to bring Guevara’s great revolutionary deeds to the big screen for the mass audience (one just needs to look at Soderbergh’s poor results), because simply, as Gaber sang, it is no longer the moment: in these times of depersonalizing globalization, rampant populism, and revisionist superficiality, it is intimacy that counts, as it is the only thing capable of helping us find ourselves, making us aware no longer of what we are not & do not want today but of what we are & want.

Only in this way will we return to believe, no longer in something we now see as creased, tired, outdated, and unattainable - Marx's Das Kapital, Hitler's Mein Kampf - but in something in which we see ourselves, where we are ourselves face to face with ourselves; for this, it is necessary to rediscover our intimacy, hidden behind the great ideologies that enslaved peoples & destroyed revolutions: to believe, and believe in ourselves before the idea, the cause, the revolution.