2024 | Argentina | Documentary

Todo Documento De Civilización (Every Document Of Civilization)

  • Spanish English, French 88 mins
  • Director | Tatiana Mazú González
  • Writer | Tatiana Mazú González
  • Producer | Nacho Losada

STATUS: Released

This film is currently not available.   

Every document of civilization is at the same time a document of barbarism. The phrase is from Walter Benjamin. Tatiana Mazú González takes up the beginning of it to title her film. "And the same barbarism that affects it, also affects the process of its transmission from hand to hand," continues the author. Against this barbarism, and to account for the struggles of individuals made invisible, erased from the writing of History, Tatiana Mazú González rises up. In Río Turbio (FID 2020), she went to war against the ostracization of women from the eponymous mining town. There, she takes up the case of the forced disappearance of Luciano Arruga, a teenager tortured and killed by the Buenos Aires police, to conduct a clinical and critical examination, meticulously dissecting the traces of the state crime. "Reality is a stratified mass grave; this film, a process of excavation," writes the director. Positioned at the intersection of General Paz and Mosconi avenues where the teenager was last seen, her camera, as if to detect the invisible, stubbornly scrutinizes the details of the landscape – asphalt, traffic lights, waste – which she brings together, through editing, with a whole corpus of iconography constituting the memory of the young man – archives of gatherings in his honor, graffiti, photos. In doing so, Tatiana Mazú González brings to light the truth of a counter-History, which the crystalline voice of Luciano's mother, an admirable tragic storyteller, hammers home with anaphora, nuances and silences. Against the barbarity of a transmission process that never ceases to obscure the vision of the "vanquished" (Benjamin) and to silence their words, there remain images, faces and stories, to which cinema, that is to say the montage of images, faces and stories, can still give substance, to restore all their power of protest.

Documentary Activism Social Justice Historical Civilization Barbarism Affect Struggle Protest Restore Crime
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