The heroes of the new Argentine series The Eternaluta They are neighbors of the Vicente López neighborhood. Common people, from the Buenos Aires middle class, which was not ready for the toxic snow that some alien invaders brought. They will learn to organize, build trenches and think collectively to form a common resistance. The story adapts a comic of 1957, whose author, Héctor Germán Oesterheld, had witnessed two years before the bombings of military fighters in the Plaza de Mayo and the subsequent shooting of Peronists in a dump. He and his four daughters are among the thousands of names that make up the list of disappeared from the dictatorship. The political analogies shot, turning the comics into an emblem that is now recovered by Netflix almost 70 years later, in a context where productions on South American dictatorships of the second half of the twentieth century not only proliferate, but are well received. Its authors argue that they do not make merely historical films, but warnings about the present.
The last Oscar winner for best international film, I’m still here, made in 2024, addresses the struggle of a Carioca woman to carry out her four children after her husband, an opponent, was kidnapped and killed in 1971 by the authoritarian government of Emílio Garrastazu. In fact, of the four South American films that have won this award, three are dealing with military regimes. In the recent edition of La Berlinale, he won the Fipresci Award Under the flags, the sun (2025), Paraguayan documentary that brings together archive images of Alfredo Stroessner, de facto governor for 35 years (1954-1989) and considered the first despot of this stage. And the only film in the region that will be in the official team of the next edition of Cannes is the Brazilian The secret agent (2025), about a teacher fleeing São Paulo in 1977 when he was criminalized for alleged subversive activities.
“If we do not emphasize the memory, the same thing that happened to us will happen: every March 24 [Día de la memoria por la verdad y la justicia en Argentina] We left two million people to celebrate the rights won. And ultraliberal psychotics come, along with people from the dictatorship, because the vice president was a lawyer of the military, and advances are lost instantly, ”says Emiliano Serra, director of Correspondent (2024). The film tells the conversion of a journalist in the spy journalist of the Jorge Videla (1976–1981) regime to inform about those who consider enemies of the government. The thoroughness and detail with which the day to day and the social relations of the persecuted were recorded later to prosecute the main responsible, such as investigating another Argentine tape: Argentina, 1985 (2022).
Denialism of dictatorships
Despite being one of the most blood dictatorships – with more than 7,000 politicians and 30,000 missing – the Government of Javier Milei has denied these figures twice. The same denialism proclaimed the Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, declared a nostalgic of the military leaders, to which 434 murders are attributed in the period 1964–1985. In addition, he called “national Hero” to torturer Carlos Alberto Brilhante. Therefore, when director Walter Salles presented I’m still here At the Venice Festival, he defended cinema as an “instrument against oblivion.”
The same appeal to the political situation made the filmmaker and actor Wagner Moura when he premiered Marighella (2019). The film recreates the last five years of the guerrilla and writer Carlos Marighella, killed in 1969: “Talking about Marighella, who resisted the dictatorship, is talking about those who resist now in Brazil,” said the now protagonist of The secret agent In a previous interview with this medium. Other productions point to authors of crimes that until today enjoy impunity. This is the case of the Chilean The burned look (2021), who tells the life of the 19 -year -old photographer Rodrigo Rojas, who was burned alive with his 18 partner, Carmen Quintero.
Both were sprayed with gasoline and burned by members of a military patrol when they participated in a national strike in 1986, 13 years after the coup d’etat of Augusto Pinochet. “There was a sentence against those involved in 2024, three years after the premiere (…), the film put the case in the media very importantly. From that place you can know impunity, lack of justice. I do not believe that the cinema meets a role, but the movies do act,” says the director, Tatiana Gaviola. This hope that the announced National Plan for the Search of Victims of Forced Disappearance can find the whereabouts of the 1,469 Chileans who remain missing. However, Gaviola points out, the crimes committed in those years of terror are an unfinished story that remains open in statements such as those of the Chile Vamos party leader, Evelyn Matthei, who said two weeks ago that “it was inevitable that he would have died” at the beginning of the dictatorship.
The crimes that continue without being resolved are also the axis of The count (2023), but not only those related to human rights, but those of embezzlement and Pinochet millionaire embezzlement. In the key to satire, the filmmaker Pablo Larraín imagines the bloodthirsty dictator – which caused more than 3,000 homicides – as a vampire that is still alive. “There is still a third of the Chilean population who thinks that Pinochet was a great man, and what hurts them most is that he has been a thief, not a systematic rapist of human rights,” he said in the presentation of the film in the Venice’s show of Venice, the filmmaker Santiaguino, who already set three of his works in the Pinochet mandate (1973–1990). In 2018, Chilean justice seized bank assets and assets of the coup descendants, after accusing him of illicit enrichment through more than 125 accounts that he kept in the US under false names.
Series, documentaries and movies
The variety of nations from which this type of productions come reveals that the validity or pending issues of military regimes are a transversal problem to the subcontinent. Among them you can mention fictions When men are alone (Bolivia, 2019), The year of fury (Uruguay, 2020), 1976 (Chile, 2022), The maximum penalty (Peru, 2022), The Andes prison (Chile, 2023) o The escape (Colombia, 2025). In the documentary field, they arose about it THE REVOLUTION AND THE EARTH (Peru, 2019), Condor operation (Argentina, 2020) – which is named after the coordinated international repression plan between six South American countries – or Kill Altamirano (Chile, 2023). For television, it stands out, in addition to The Eternalutawhich had its premiere last week, the Chilean series Allende’s thousand days (2023).
“The productions on memory are already a subgenre. No Latin American Film Festival omits these pieces. Not so much for its programming criteria, but because of its volume, it is something that is always visiting,” says the programmer of the Radical Film Festival and Bolivian researcher Sergio Zapata. Most of these films are narrated as thrillers politicians, in which tension reigns. Except for some exceptions, the protagonists are not leftist guerrillas or occupy a high public office in charge of repression, but on foot people who see their daily life for military harassment and a state of terror that exploits them in their face.
Of course, filmmakers always leave space for a violent scene that reflects the bloody and inhuman of torture to political prisoners in raised centers for this purpose. Lugubres places, with just light, in which shouts of despair of men and women who ask their executioners to stop, such as recreate, are heard I’m still here. Director Santiago Miter opted, in Argentina, 1985by the verbal, through the testimonies of those who came to the trial against Videla and their military board: “The guards began to make a barbecue, they got drunk. They began to torture me, but this time they did not want information; their goal was to tell ‘me as folded and my mother is a daughter of a bitch,” says one of them in the movie.
Moura decided to be more visual and emulate the real denigrations from testimonies in Marighella. In one of the moments of the film, a militant is tied from and feet to a metal chair, with a swollen face and the lips. One of the torturers places a soaked towel on the face and begins to pour water slowly, causing simulated asphyxiation. Another of the detainees is suspended in the air from the wrists, while applying electric shocks in the genitals. The director says: “He wanted to face that torture scene with the greatest possible crudeness. It was very important to provoke the viewer, because the reality was much worse than that, and people need to know what a dictatorship is.”
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