Above the title is the place and date, Buenos Aires, 1977.  It is Argentina in the second year of the dictatorship of the Generals.

This film is both sombre and gruelling to watch.  The screenplay is based on a book by the central character, Claudio Tamburrini, a young footballer whose mother and sister are questioned cruelly because of false information from a tortured informer and who is abducted, interrogated, tortured and imprisoned with cruelty and barbarity.

The screenplay is a Day one, day three… format.  The unrelieved treatment of the men, the handheld camerawork and desaturated colour, make it difficult to identify fully and emotionally with the characters (except, perhaps, to wonder what we would do and say in such horrible situations).  We observe, we are aghast, we are sorry.  And we are emotionally disgusted with the brutality of the torturers and the guards.

At the end, when the naked prisoners attempt an escape from the villa where they are interned, the audience is much more able to identify emotionally with the desperation and the courage.

The stories of the Argentinian tortured and ‘disappeared’ can not be told too often.  This stark film is a contribution to awareness of oppression and torture and abuse of human rights.  Most of the central characters were able to testify to commissions set up in 1985 to deal with the Junta’s abuses.

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