Chile: la memoria obstinada

During the first days after the 1973 Chilean coup d’état, the political leadership of the Popular Unity government was arrested and transferred to Dawson Island, Magallanes Region, extreme south of Chile and the mainland. The wives of the then political prisoners began an incessant effort to find out the whereabouts of their husbands and then try to return them alive. In these circumstances, they meet and spontaneously organize into a group they call the “Dawsonianas.”

Amid the civil-military dictatorship implanted with the 1964 coup, Sergio Muniz had the idea of making a documentary about the action of the Death Squad. At the time, the press still had some freedom to disseminate the work of these death squads formed by police officers of various ranks, and that he acted on the outskirts of cities like Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The victims of police repression (as today) were men, poor and black, and this condition is supposed criminals.

Faced with a lack of prosecution of those accused of crimes against humanity committed during Argentina’s military dictatorship, family members and descendants of the country’s estimated 30,000 disappeared took action. In the mid-1990s, they began gathering outside of accused perpetrators’ homes and workplaces to publicly shame them and raise awareness about the government’s systematic and brutal targeting of its people — and how it had gone unpunished. The human rights group HIJOS (Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Forgetfulness and Silence) led and labeled this direct-action style of protest “escrache,” or exposure.

Biographical portrait of the labor movement and left wing movement in Uruguay, "Conversations with Turiansky" combines two stories. The first portrays the son of immigrants, the engineer passionate about the mystery of electricity, the man in love, the movie buff. The other places the protagonist in his time: union struggles, the advance of authoritarianism, prison and the challenges of the present. In both are present the lucidity, commitment, discreet tenderness and humor of Wladimir Turiansky.

Documentary about the detention-disappearance of Juan Marcos Herman in the city of Bariloche during the dictatorship in Argentina.

A conversation between the director of this film, Carmen Castillo and Marcia Merino, AKA La Flaca Alejandra who was one of the collaborators of Pinochet's secret police (the DINA) after being tortured by them. It was Merino who betrayed Castillo, who lost her new born child after being tortured. Almost twenty years later, Carmen Castillo returns to Chile after her exile to film this documentary, during a time in which Marcia Merino, on the court of justice, decided to give the names of her old bosses who worked with her on the DINA.

Documentary about a political episode during the Brazilian military dictatorship, which resulted in the issue of the Institutional Act #5 (AI-5), abolishing freedom of opinion in Brazil, and marking the transition to the toughest period of violation of human rights in the country. The episode was the Congress Assembly on December 12th, 1968, in which its members denied permission to punish congressman Márcio Moreira Alves, as was the Government's wish.

Agüero is able to look at the scene in all it's complexity around architectonical brutality that Santiago de Chile underwent around the year 2000.