The film will be formulaic and predictable for all viewers familiar with titles like ‘Winners or Losers’, ‘Spotlight’, ‘Some Good Men’ and ‘The Trial of the Chicago 7’
Between April 22 and August 14, 1985, it took place in Buenos Aires the trial against the military junta who had governed Argentina between 1976 and 1983, which resulted in exemplary convictions to figures as gloomy as Jorge Rafael Videla, Eduardo Massera and others responsible for the torture and disappearance of tens of thousands of people that had taken place during that period; and ‘Argentina 1985’, the fiction by director Santiago Miter that is competing this year at the Mostra, recreates that process by focusing both in the person of prosecutor Julio César Strassera, embodied by Ricardo Darín, as in the team of young lawyers who helped him achieve those sentences.
Despite the fact that in its first sequences the film threatens to align itself with the American conspiracy thrillers of the 70s, it does not take long to put its true ingredients on the table: portraits of good men willing to go as far as necessary in pursuit of justice, shocking testimonies about torture, praises of teamwork, vague procedural setbacks, perfectly delineated heroes and villains, cathartic final speeches and an abundance of violins on the soundtrack among other clichés probably inspired by many previous films about famous judicial processes, investigations against large-scale corruption scandals and vengeful re-enactments of historical episodes. In other words, will be formulaic and predictable for all those viewers minimally familiar with titles like ‘Winners or Vanquished’, ‘Spotlight’, ‘Some Good Men’, ‘The Trial of the Chicago 7’ and many others. It is difficult to what extent and faithful to the verified facts, because at no time does he bother to hide what his true inspiration is.
Documentary on OxyContin addiction
Also presented today among the candidate films this year for the Golden Lion, ‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed’ uses the documentary format to talk about a very different genocide: the epidemic generated by addiction to the drug known as OxyContin, marketed by the Sackler family – one of the richest and most powerful in the world – and which has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in the United States; and to that end its director, Laura Poitras, focuses on the illustrious photographer Nan Goldin, who between 2014 and 2017 was addicted to it and who in subsequent years has dedicated herself body and soul to combat the almighty pharmaceutical power and, specifically, to orchestrate sabotage actions in museums -the Guggenheim, the Met, the Louvre- sponsored by the Sacklers.
The film devotes even parts of its footage to recounting Goldin’s life and showcasing his work, on the one hand, and to witnessing his newfound activist zeal, on the other; and in the meantime he does not delve into one aspect or the other. Poitras fails to capture the iconographic magnitude of Goldin’s sweaty New York portraits of the ’70s and ’90s, and she’s uninterested in delving even slightly into the opioid crisis that has plagued her country for years; in that sense, she is so focused on extolling the activism of the photographer that can’t find room for a single dissenting voice. The film, eye, has been produced by Goldin.