Marco Bechis
Garage Olimpo

"A person is born, then gets lost in nothingness, the story doesn't close, it has no end. I, who have been a widow since before my children were abducted, go to the cemetery, to my husband's grave, and I know that he is there. However, even though I know my children have been killed, I know nothing else, and this is terrible... When our children disappeared, we mothers were treated as crazy, we were told they were out there somewhere, wandering around Europe, that they were hiding because they wanted to stay away from us. It was a tremendous psychological violence". Angela "Lita" Boitano, mother of Michelangelo and Adriana, abducted and never returned.

Argentina, 1976. A self-proclaimed scum takes over the government and begins the systematic destruction of opposition, freedom of thought and speech, and democracy. A broad strategy, with the supervision and blessing of the CIA, as it is now well documented, aimed at suppressing democratic movements developing throughout the South American continent, to maintain the privileged positions held by the United States in the area. And with the tacit consent of the entire Western world, which "rewarded" Argentina in '78 by entrusting it with the World Cup.

A small group of opponents gives life to an impromptu clandestine resistance, but they are scattered, terrified, disorganized. Maria, one of them, is a teacher working in the poor neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, living in a large house with her mother and having a tenant, Felix, who is unknowingly a henchman of the regime. Discovered, Maria is captured, under the astonished eyes of her mother, and taken to Garage Olimpo, one of over three hundred centers where opponents are "interrogated", testimony to the fierce, relentless and scientific apparatus of repression set up by the military dictatorship. Maria's ordeal begins, the interrogations, the humiliations, her ambiguous and desperate relationship with Felix, infatuated with her, now her only link to the outside world. The film does not dwell on detailing physical violence, quite the opposite. The horror arises from the juxtaposition of torture with the most banal acts of everyday life: the executioners who punch the clock when entering and leaving, like ordinary clerks, the radio left at full volume playing a trivial song, to cover the screams of the tortured, agents playing ping-pong to "distract" themselves between interrogations. And finally, the aseptic routine of executions: a sleeping drug injection passed off as a vaccination, the unconscious prisoners loaded onto a plane heading toward the ocean, the door opens, and twenty, thirty young people disappear forever and without leaving a trace. Thirty thousand people met this fate.

Maria is not a heroine. She will yield to torture, she will talk. Yet, her fate is sealed. Once she crosses the threshold of Garage Olimpo, she simply ceases to exist, to have a face, a name, parents, belongings. Everything is systematically recycled by the vultures circling around the infernal disappearance mechanism. A simple division of the spoils of war: the houses are taken by the torturers, who quickly move in their family, their wife, and their children whom they love dearly. The young children of the disappeared are taken from their parents and given in adoption to military and police who do not have any. All in the most casual and trivial routine: to remind us that at the bottom of the most scandalous brutality, the deepest abjection, there is always the face of one of our own kind.

Maria will come to give herself to her torturer, for a moment of respite, in the hope of freedom. In vain, once again.

An indispensable film, but also a tremendous punch to the stomach, that will certainly not make you rise from your seat with a lightened heart, that will certainly not contribute to the serenity of your nights.

An indispensable film, a heartfelt plea for justice to finally be done: these murderers are, to this day, almost all at large, strolling undisturbed through the country they helped tear to pieces, sipping their damn drink in their luxurious villas with a pool.

An indispensable film, to know, to not forget. Never.